The morning news. [volume] (Savannah, Ga.) 1887-1900, 1899-10-22
PLAQUES IN A GERM NURSERY.
VAST INSTITUTION WHERE THEY
ARD KEPT ON TAP.

and What Is Done There.
From the New York Press.
London,-If the people in a large, clean
looking brick building which stands on
/ the Thames embankment, only step from
Chelsea bridge. ever should happen to get
a grudge against the world. the world
will have good cause to rue that day.
Given half chance. il wouldn't take
| these folk much more than a week or so
to kill off two-thrds of the earths inhabi-
tants and get we'll along toward wiping
out the other third. They would probably
attend to the depopulation of England be-
| fore breakfast.
The plague did uncommonly well in Lon
don in Charles lis time, and it might con-
trlve to make considerable trouble now.
The people in this building keep plague
on tap
The place thus furnished with every mod
! ern convenience for conducting particu-
| larly destructive campaign against hui
manity was, however, built by charitable
millionaires for a directly opposite pur-
| pose. 1t is called the British Institute of
| Preventive Medicine. 1t was established
! q Hitie over d year ago, at a Cost Oh ~
| 100000. Moreover, Lord Iveagh whose
family name is Guinness, and whose Dub
! lin stout brought TO him baronetcy, has
| just given TO the institution a million and
! a quarter more. He imposed a few con-
/ ditons on the gift which brought the mat
| ter into court for technical adjudication.
! Last week the judges straight tened out the
! tangle, and the magnificent sum which is
now available will make this germ house
| one of the wonders of the world.
Worlds Germ Headquarters.
The purpose of the institute is three
/ fold: Ii is a college where a physician
! who is to act as a health officer can come
/ and learn how TO classify the bacilh he
/ meets in a business way, and also how
! 10 fight them, and to which the ordinary
! physical can drop a post card to find
! cut how to cope with new variety of dis.
ease germ. Besides this it is a kind of
medical war office, which makes a bust
ness of hunting up the strongholds Of
troublesome bacilli and planning cam
paigns against Them; and, finaly-though
| this is not included in the Institutions
! prospectus-it is a home-hke boarding
house for uncounted billions of deadly
/ germs.
l asked to see the room where these
| germs lived, and was introduced to it by
! DR., Hewlett, who is the chief bacterioio-
gst. This remarkable room was flooded
with sunlight from row of great windows
that look out on the Thames and Batter
sea Park, and there were also electric
| lights on every hand. On all sides were
chemical apparatus highly Furnished mi
| croscopes, tall g.ass Jars labeled distilled
water" square iron heating ovens with
| glass doors, filled with round plates, also
| of glass, which seemed 10 have something
| cooking in them. On one side of the wall
| were a series of innumerabie pockets, and
| each one of these was filed to overlooking
| with round glass test tubes, their ends
stuffed with ordinary cotton batting, the
| top of which had been scorched. Above
each of these pockets was pasted a slip
of paper bearing the bulky scientific name
of its contents.
In the Nursery of Plaques.
"All these innocent looking glass tubes
that you see there" said DIR. Hewlett,
contain deadly disease germs" He began
lifting various ones out. holding them up
/ to the light as carelessly as if each were
4 full of bread pills instead of enterprising
animalcula. "This," he said, picking up
a tube containing a sort of yellow fluid,
lis the bacillus which causes plague-the
'bubonic plague now troubling Oporto;
here are the bacilH of typhoid fever and
of cholera. This furry-loolIing specimen
is the lockjaw bacillus; his neghbOr pro-
duces diphtheria and the bacillus which
puts off this brownish fluid also does bit
/ in the CHAMBERS way. They are Invisible to
the naked eye, of course, but can be dis
tinguished by the quality of the matter
4 which emanates from them. We have
hosts of others the names of which you
wouldn't recognize 50 easily. Yes, they
are all alive If you notice, The side of
each of these tubes is covered with a yell
lowsh substance. The bacill live on that
We make it down stairs, and a variety Of
! things enter into it, chief among them be-
rv-.-
the blood of horses and mixed with gela-
tine. We also use agar jelly, which IS
drawn from japanese weed. In some Of
the tubes are strips of potato The bacllli
thrive on potato or on milk or meat broth
Every tube contains millions Of the bacilH,
each of them about one twelve-thousandth
of an inch long"
He Thrives on Decay.
/ On the experimenting table stood q wood
| en- holder containing a whole row of ne
/ cultures which seemed to b. about half
flied with pigments of various brilliant
/ colors "Those tubes also contain germs. "
said Dr. Hewlett land the bright co'or =
/ matter is a liquid thrown off by them. This
particular bacillus is known as the b. clli-
! prodigiosus.' and is Harmless. We believe
! that the legends of so-caIled bleeding
hosts in different Roman Catholic
churches have their foundation in the red
pigment which one variety of this baccill
/ throwns off. Germs are not in the at
mosphere in great quantities. They thrive
| in the surface of the earth and in pools Of
| still water, or in water into which decay
ing substances have been thrown. Wher-
ever there is decay, there you find the bac-
! illus in all his glory"
| as there sex in bacilli?' was asked.
mo. The propagation Of baciln is not
carried on through birth, but is the result
! Of a remarkable geometrical separation in
the animal itself, which occurs every half
! hour That is to say, every half hour each
bacillus divides into two parts, and at the
| end of another half hour each of those
parts has again DIVIDED into TWO. So il is
! easy to see how wonderfully rapid is the
| increase i'm numbers of the inhabitants Of
| these cultures When Comparatively few
bacilh have been placed with the nu RI
| tious jelly. in one of these cultures it Is
necessary at the end of two weeks, or even
! less time, 10 remove half of them. IL this
is neglected by the end Of the third week
all the bacni win have died from sheer
At mo aa