UIHistories Project: A History of the University of Illinois by Kalev Leetaru
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Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1882 [PAGE 116]

Caption: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1882
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110 After death waste goes on in a different way, through the physiological and normal activities of other living beings, and the more noticeably because there is no repair. Among these latter destroyers there are very many kinds of animals and plants. Indeed all animals are included in the list, and the digestion of food with them is always a work of destruction, as is readily understood. There are among flowering plants certain kinds which are also purely destroyers—the dodder or golden thread (cuscuta), found sometimes in tangled profusion on weeds, flax, clover, etc., is common with us. But it is to the Fungi that we must look for the principal agents, of the plant kind, which act as pure destroyers of organic matter. These degraded plants live solely on the accumulated and organized products of other plants and animals, assimilating a portion for the architecture of their own bodily structure, and exhaling another very considerable part as waste, in one shape or another, but ultimately as carbonic acid and water, two prominent ingredients in the original nutrition of green-leaved plants. Nitrogenous compounds, as ammonia, nitric and butyric acids, are also given off in the destruction of most organic matter. An &ld log in the woods- having no tendency to decay, and resisting much better than iron the slow corrosion of the oxygen of the air, tumbles to powder under the digestive power of insects, toadstools and Bacteria, each kind working differently, but accomplishing nearly the same result. It has already been said that in their physiological effects at least the Bacteria are Fungi. Their food is organic, elaborated in the first instance, if not direct, by green-leaved plants. Their function is to destroy, like that of other colorless plants and all animals. In this process of destruction peculiar and characteristic effects are usually produced by each species, and in very many cases each species is limited to some special kind of food material. In this there is nothing new or strange, for the law holds good throughout all nature, among all animals and all plants. If, now, we remember the facility of distribution which these minute organisms enjoy, their vital endurance and their wonderful powers of reproduction, we need not after all be surprised that milk, wherever left exposed under the proper conditions of temperature, etc., becomes sour through the agency of a living organism developing in, and feeding on, some element or elements of its substance; or that fresh meat becomes ill-scented through the respiration of similar living things, acting in a similar way. Keep these destroyers out, and no such results would occur. In wide arid regions where there is but little material on which they may develop, their uniform presence in the air or on the surfaces of solids, cannot be expected, and this is the secret (now a secret no longer) of the fact that meat keeps in such places without putrefying.. Since the white man has made his habitation in the West where the old hunter used to expose his jerked buffalo with impunity to the warm sun and air, this can no longer be done with butchered flesh. But it is still found possible on these wind-swept plains to keep meat fresh for a considerable time by sticking it on poles high above the earth, above the usual dissemination in these places of living organisms. The same thing is true