Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1886-07-31
ORGANISMS AND PUrREFACTION
Some Strange Facts Developed by Scien-
tific Research,

tific Research.
About the middle of the seventeenth
century one Anton Leeuwenhoek lived in
the town of Delft, in Holland, as the stew
ard of Judge there He was accustomed
to employ his leisure in making simple
lenses, wherewith he magnified and exam
ined the structure of such things as butter
flies and gnats' wings. He had great
manipulative skill, and made several hun
dreds of lenses, each one to suit some par
ticular object he wished to study. With
one of these simple instruments, in April,
1875, 30 years ago, did Leeuwenhoek re-
veal new and hitherto unsupported world
of living things. He placed under one of
his simple microscopes glass of rain wa
ter, and perceived a multitude of vari-
ously shaped bodies darting to and
fro in the water. Further expert
ments showed the presence Of similar
bodies in various animal and vegetable in
fusions. Hence these animalcule, as their
discoverer supposed them to be, have been
termed Infusoria. Whence came they
Was it true, as the philosophers of an
tiquity believed, that decaying animal or
vegetable matter, under the influence of
heat, with sufficient air and moisture, could
beget anew, de moro living things? Could
the " sun breed maggots in dead dog,
being god-kissing carrion ?' Now it
happens that, thirty-seven years before
Leeuwenhoek's discovery, similar ques-
ton had been distrustfully put by a ply
clan of Florence, Franquois Redi, and had
been confidently answered in the negative.
Redi was not satisfied that the sun could
breed maggots in dead dog or in any other
kind of dead meat, and he put the ques-
ton to the test of an experiment as simple
as it was conclusive. In hot weather he
placed some fresh meat in a jar whose
mouth he covered with gauze. In an
lar piece of meat. He observed that,
while the exposed meat speedily became
sinking and swarmed with maggots, the
piece under cover, though it also became
sinking, remained quite free from mag
gots. Moreover, he noticed that multi
tudes of flies buzzed about the gauze, I'M
able to get to the meat, and that on the
gauze maggots were bred from eggs de-
posted there by the flies. The maggots
were, then, not the products of putrid
organic matter exposed to the influences
of heat, air, and moisture, but the direct
offspring of living things. Could this
explanation be applied to the infusoria of
Leeuwenhoek? Were they also Matched
from eggs, or in some other way the off
spring of preceding infusoria? This was
much more difficult question, and not
at first sight capable of a test so
simple as Redi's. Moreover, observ-
ers Aoeked to the new field Of
investigation opened up By the microscope.
The simple microscope was improved on,
and as the instrument became more and
more powerful, smaller and still smaller
living things came into view, till some
were clearly revealed that would appear as
mere points under Leeuwenhoeks simple
lens, while the modern compound micro
scope discovers others as invisible to the
simple lens as the infusoria are to the
naked eye. The problem to be solved does
not alter with the diminution in size,
though its difficulty is proportionately in
creased. The question is still: Whence
come they? In every organic infusion
that has stood for day or two in 4 mod
erately warm atmosphere they swarm in
myriads. Are they begotten by the mere
breaking down, the putrefaction, the death
and decay of the organic infusion, or are
they only begotten by parents like to
| them Good Words.