 CHAPTER 1 PART 1 OF BACTERIA IN DAILY LIFE BACTERIA IN DAILY LIFE by Grace Colridge Franklin Spirits, when they please, can either sex assume, or both, so soft and uncompounded is their essence pure, not tired or manacled with joint or limb, nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, like cumbers flesh, but in what shape they choose. Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure, can execute their eerie purposes, and works of love or enmity fulfill. Preface. The title of this little volume sufficiently explains its contents. It only remains to add that much of the text has already appeared from time to time in the form of popular articles in various magazines. It has, however, been carefully revised and considerably added to in parts where later researches have thrown further light upon the subjects dealt with. G. C. Franklin, Northfield Worcestershire, November 1902 CHAPTER 1 BACTERIOLOGY IN THE VICTORIAN ERROR A little more than sixty years ago the scientific world received with almost incredulous astonishment the announcement that beer yeast consists of small spherules which have the property of multiplying and are therefore a living and not a dead chemical substance that they further appear to belong to the vegetable kingdom and to be in some manner intimately connected with the process of fermentation. When Cagniard Latour communicated the above observations on yeast to the Paris Academy of Sciences on June 12, 1837, the whole scientific world was taken by storm, so great was the novelty, boldness, and originality of the conception that these insignificant particles hitherto reckoned as a little or no account should be in doubt with functions of such responsibility and importance as suggested by Latour. At the time when Latour sowed the first seeds of this great gospel of fermentation, started curiously almost simultaneously across the Rhine by Schwan and Kutzing, its greatest subsequent apostle and champion was but a schoolboy exhibiting nothing more than a schoolboy's truant love of play and distaste for lessons. Louis Pasteur was only allowed a fifteen, buried in a little town in the provinces of France, whose peace of mind was certainly not disturbed or likely to be by rumors of any scientific discussion, however momentous, carried on in the great far distant metropolis. Yet, some thirty and odd years later, there was not a country in the whole world where Pasteur's name was not known and associated with those classical investigations on fermentation, in the pursuit of which he spent so many years of his life and which have proved of such incalculable benefit to the world of commerce as well as science. Thanks to Pasteur we are no longer in doubt as to the nature of yeast cells. So familiar.