The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1905-11-19


rants, and drunks which came before
him day after day? No; the good vast
~ outnunber the bad in every COM
munity. Where there is one Mrs. Chad
WICK there are a hundred thousand
good, honest mothers quietly raising
their babies and taking care of the
homes Of the land and who by their
very virtues never get their names in
the daily papers. Just SO with the
great world of bacterial life; it has been
the wicked and vicious ones who have
received all the attention and who by
their sheer infamy have been already
lnmortalized in monographs, text books
and treatises, been chriStened with
fine Latin names and have been honor
ed with endless study and investiga-
ton, while their poor neglected bet
ters. the innocent ones, doing the
worlds drudgery, have in countless in
stances as yet not even been named.
The subject of the benefcent bacteria
is so vast, in SO many ways do bac
terra contribute to our we'll being, that
one scarcely knows where TO particu-
larize, but attention may first be call
ed to their work as natures scaven-
gers. 1t is to be remembered that no
other form of organic life on earth,
either vegetable or animal is so prev
alent or universally distributed the
world over as are bacteria. We
street is ladened with them, they are
in the soil and in the air, all bodies
of water. the ocean, rivers, ponds, lakes
and reservoirs contain them although
ordinarily in an almost dormant con-
e..
rapid growth and multiplication is held
in check through want of one or more
of the very essential conditions of their
we'll being, among which may be men
toned, food, moisture a proper tenn
perature, etc. Although regarded as
belonging to the vegetable kingdom,
while plants gather their own food, so
to speak, from soil and air, and ami
mails derive theirs primarily from
plant life, bacteria differ from plants
on the one hand and animals on the
other, in that they must have their
food ready made, or, in other words,
they must derive it from the higher
and more complex compounds of ami
NAL and vegeta BILE formation. The in
slant life is extinct in an animal or a
plant TIE bacteria stand ready to seize
upon it as their legitimate prey. Here
then, universally distributed in nature
is a gigantic power dormant but po-
tential, awaiting only an environment
of the favorable conditions of food,
moisture and temperature to awaken
it into the liveliest activity.
We have all seen a gang of work
men taking down an old building which
had reached the limit of its useful
ness, how they disintegrate it piece
by piece, carting the elements away
to enter. perhaps, into the erection OF
other and modern structures. So the
busy workmen, known as bacteria, by
seizin,g upon certain elements of the
dead material which they select as
which we call putrifaction, or decom-
position, or rotting, but it is simply
taking down the old wornout struc-
ture and converting the building mate
rial. the carbon, the oxygen, the nitro
gen, the hydrogen, the lime and what
not to other uses. Nothing lost or
wasted in nature, nothing is ami
Inflated, the building material is avail
able for use again and again over and
over. The hymn-writer who said
'Change ana decay IN all around l see
was literally correct. Were it not
so, this earth, with it's piled up ac-
cumuIation of dead vegetable and ami
NAL matter would soon become unin-
ha bitable. And not only on land. in
field and forest, in mountain and val
ley do we find this incessant work GO
ing on of disintegrating dead animal
and vegetable matter, but in rivers and
and lakes as well. 1t has long been
observed that the water of river re-
ceiving the sewage of a whole city
showed a tendency to cleanse and puri-
fy itself so that a few miles down
stream, the water became as clear and
fresh as that above the city, but in
recent years only have we learned
that the true scavengers were the bac-
terra contained in the sewage itself
destroying its physical character by
setting up chemical action. thus trans
hitting it's very nature into soluble
and innocuous forms. Acting upon the
hint thus derived from nature, a re-
cent method of disposing of sewage
known as the filter bed process" al
though wrongly named as it is not a