Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1882 [PAGE 102]

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96 tudinously present, near us, and on us and in us, as the various kinds of the microscopic organisms of which we now write. If pure well water does not contain these or any other living things, all foul waters do. Bacteria or their allies exist in countless myriads in all filth, in all decomposing vegetable or animal matter, whether illscented or not, in all organic substances undergoing apparently spontaneous change, as heating in the mass, becoming sour, rancid, or putrid, and, generally, those changes known as fermentation or decay. The water from ill-scented cisterns, and indeed from many in which odor is imperceptible, contains varying numbers of these minute living creatures. The water of foul ditches, stagnant ponds, marshes and sloughs teems with them, in numbers surpassing those of the leaves of the forests; a drop under the microscope often presents a maze of living forms, more wonderful than imagination ever pictured, or of which fiction ever dreamed. The waters of running streams are more or less inhabited by them, and the ocean itself is the special home of peculiar kinds. The air may, like water, be absolutely pure or clouded by innumerable numbers of the almost imponderable, but living, multiplying things. Wherever there is floating dust of organic origin, they may be said to be certainly present. The stifled atmosphere of close apartments, and of thickly built streets, especially over decomposing filth, is laden with various forms of Bacteria and allied organisms; and these are unavoidably inhaled by ourselves with every breath inspired. But in the dry, open country, few of them can be found in the pure, fresh, invigorating air, and over wide desert regions and the tops of high mountains none whatever exist. With us the air in winter, especially when the earth is long covered with snow, becomes almost free, while in midsummer and autumn, especially after damp and close weather, their myriad numbers are wafted to and fro by every movement of the freighted atmosphere. The shine on vessels of standing water, on the surface of vegetable or animal substances, like cold articles of food set away for some time, eg. boiled potatoes, cooked meats, etc., is composed of these organisms and their products. Brewers' yeast, used in bread making, is not a Bacterium, but it is a related growth, and the socalled salt-rising, not unfrequently used in making bread, owes its energy to living Bacteria. Sour milk always contains swarms of the microscopic, moving things, and during the formation vinegar from the juice of fruits, from solutions of whisky and sugar, etc., they may always be found in similar numbers. They are invariably present in pus from open, suppurating wounds, in the discharge from5 boils and tumors on and in our own bodies, and in the ill-scented accumulations of the bodily excretions, as from the arm-pits and unwashed feet. If they have any connection with bad odor, no one will wonder why the breath sometimes smells bad if the material collecting on the teeth or the fur on the tongue can be seen under a good microscope. The cleanest human mouth can hardly be said to be ever perfectly free from these active organisms; while, those to which the tooth brush or its equivalent is a stranger, are veritable culture boxes, or hot houses, richly supplied with rapidly growing and prodigiously multiplying forms and