stand in the way of this fact, established as it has been by hundreds, if not thousands, of rigidly conducted experiments.

My respondent calls his article a 'reply.' It is the reply which antecedent knowledge would have led me to expect; but it is not, I submit, the reply which the English public, including the medical profession of England, had a right to expect. It is a reply upon side issues which do not touch the core of the question at all. Let me point out something which demanded a reply, but to which none has been given. Reference has been already made to my cloud of witnesses,' for the interpretation of whose testimony my respondent seemed to intimate that he possessed a private key. The true inference from that testimony is that it refutes my respondent. But were it not that I wished to follow his instructions formally and scrupulously, and thus deprive him of all opportunity of cavil or complaint, the refutation was unnecessary. The evidence already recorded against him in the industrial arts was simply overwhelming. Not by hundreds, nor by thousands, but by millions, the witnesses might be counted which contradict him. For, what are most of our preserved meats and vegetables but the results of experiments in which his instructions have been carried out and his statements disproved? Animal and vegetable tissues are placed in tin vessels, each with a small hole in its lid. The tins are boiled, steam issues through the hole, and after some minutes' boiling the tin is hermetically sealed. This is to all intents and purposes the process described by my respondent before the Pathological Society. Every sound tin thus prepared is therefore a witness against him. I am aware that he has met what he is pleased to call Mr. Huxley's empty generalities' by stating that the tins of a certain establishment which he visited were boiled for an hour and a half, and after sealing were subjected to a temperature of 258° for half an hour. But this is not the universal practice, and millions of tins have been prepared without this subsequent superheating. It is idle, moreover, to lay any stress upon this point; for the substances after having been superheated remain putrescible, though they do not putrefy, or show the slightest tendency or power to generate life.

To meet this crushing demonstration my respondent invented the theory referred to in my January article, according to which sound tins do, in the first instance, ferment, the associated organisms committing suicide by the pressure of the gases developed by their own vital actions. This is the very first point to which his 'reply,' if he meant it to be a real one, ought to have been directed. Why did he, when dealing with a question described by himself as 'lying at the root of the most fatal class of diseases to which the human race is liable,' commit the levity of enunciating so easily tested a theory VOL. III.-No. 13. LL

without having carefully verified it experimentally? Why, after its character has been exposed, does he still leave his medical brethren in the dark regarding his views by neglecting to confess his error, and to retract it? The reply that we have a right to demand of him ought to direct itself to such points as this.

In my January article I also refer to sixty flasks prepared in the Royal Institution, and transported in warm July weather to the Alps. On their arrival, fifty-four of these flasks were found transparent and void of life. Six of them were charged with organisms, and these particular six were found on examination to have had their fragile sealed ends broken off. Here is a question for my respondent which he does not attempt to answer. I described accurately the way in which the flasks were charged and sealed, and gave him moreover a representative drawing of one of them. He does not offer a word of explanation of the sterility of the fiftyfour flasks, prepared according to his own prescription, and which ought, according to his prediction, to have swarmed with bacteria and allied organisms.' With reference to his pressure theory, which he has also applied to explain Gruithuisen's experiments, he was, moreover, informed that animal and vegetable infusions had been subjected by me to mechanical pressures far more than sufficient to produce the bactericidal effects which his theory ascribes to pressure, and that bacteria nevertheless grew and multiplied to countless swarms under such pressures, but he has not a word of answer to the fact, or of acknowledgment of what it involves. He had claimed a power for the actinic rays' as aiding in the development of organisms. By observations conducted in the powerful sun-light of the Alps, and at the temperatures which my respondent declared to be most efficient, the alleged power was proved to be a delusion. I pointed out the fundamental mistake contained in his communication to the Royal Society, where an observation made with a mineral solution is unwarrantably extended to an organic infusion, a demonstration of the de novo generation of living organisms being founded on this illegitimate process; but the 'reply' does not contain an allusion, much less an answer, to my counter demonstration. He passes without notice my remarks about positive and negative results, his misunderstanding' of which, to use the words of Dr. William Roberts, makes him blind to the overwhelming cogency of the case against him.' In reply to one of his arguments, I ask: Why, when your sterilised organic infusion is exposed to optically pure air, should this generation of life de novo utterly cease? Why should I be able to preserve my turnip juice side by side with your saline solution for three hundred and sixty-five days of the year in free connection with the general atmosphere, on the sole condition that the portion of that atmosphere in contact with the juice shall be visibly free from

floating dust, while three days' exposure to that dust fills it with bacteria?' There is no answer. These are but a fraction, and by no means the weightiest fraction, of the points urged upon his attention, but which he systematically avoids. He expands, with a 'wonderful effluence of words,' on Medicago and such like things. He deflects the discussion from the question of spontaneous generation to the totally different question whether the bacterial matter of the air exists there as germs or as finished organisms. But he leaves absolutely untouched the main facts and the most conclusive arguments of my article.

As to any bias, or prejudice, or foregone conclusion, that may beset me in this matter, I have only to remind the reader that few persons at the present day have more distinctly avowed belief in the 'potency of matter,' and that few have paid more dearly for the avowal, than myself. The criticism of highminded scholars and cultivated gentlemen, as well as the vituperation of individuals who have not yet reached that place in Nature' where gentlemanly feeling comes into play, have been liberally bestowed upon me. In a letter recently received from my excellent friend, Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, he justly remarks that I should probably have been well satisfied had my inquiries in relation to the present question justified Pouchet instead of Pasteur. With the views, indeed, which I entertain upon this subject, it specially behoves me to take care that no theoretic leaning shall taint my judgment of experimental evidence. I have always kept apart the speculative and the proved. Before Virchow laid down his canons I had reduced them to practice. My sole care has been that the potency of truth should be vindicated; and no denier of the potency of matter could labour more strenuously than I have done to demonstrate its impotence as regards spontaneous generation. While expressing, therefore, unshaken 'belief' in that form of materialism' to which I have already given utterance, I here affirm that no shred of trustworthy experimental testimony exists to prove that life, in our day, has: ever appeared independently of antecedent life.

The present condition of this question is such that no medical. man, seeking clearly to realise and effectually to remove the causes. of epidemic disease, need have his mind troubled by a doubt as to the derivation of those organisms to which modern physiology, with ever increasing emphasis, assigns such momentous functions. Clearly assured that they are not spontaneously generated, his efforts will be directed to the discovery and the destruction of the germinal matter from which they spring. Here, as I have stated in another place, the intelligent cooperation of the public with the physician is absolutely essential to success. For their sakes I have spared no pains to render my demonstrations so clear that no amount of verbal 'effluence'

will be able to obscure them. This accomplished, the controversy comes to a natural end. Neither honour to the individual nor usefulness to the public is likely to accrue from its continuance, and life is too serious to be spent in hunting down in detail the Protean errors of Dr. Bastian.

JOHN TYNDALL.

MR. FORSTER'S DEFENCE OF THE

CHURCH.

THAT Some of the journals which profess to be champions of the Establishment should receive Mr. Forster's Bradford manifesto with effusive gratitude was only to be expected, but is not therefore less significant. To the secular champions of the State Church who regard it either as a department of spiritual police, or an office of religious heraldry which serves to impress the stamp of fashion upon a certain type of religion, or an Ecclesiastical Poor Law Board which is to provide the necessary amount of instruction and service for the people, nothing could have been more acceptable. A subject for curious and interesting inquiry in the natural history of ecclesiastical opinion is suggested by the attitude which the Daily Telegraph, for example, as the representative of those so aptly characterised by the Bishop of Manchester as the 'loafers and loungers of society,' assumes towards the Establishment. It seems strange, at first sight, that those who are so desirous to prop up the tottering religion of the gentlemanly Turk should be so desirous of perpetuating the supremacy of the Anglican Church in this country; and the wonder increases when we place their defences of the Establishment by the side of their fierce diatribes against the clergy. But, however it is to be explained, these champions of Islam are, for the most part, such sturdy supporters of our Establishment that the Daily Telegraph almost condoned the sin of Mr. Forster's convincing argument on the Eastern Question, in the delight with which it received his assault on the Nonconformist position and triumphant vindication of a National Church. Such praise is eminently suggestive, and may well lead the best men of the Erastian party, and still more so those who value a State Establishment as a distinct witness, on behalf of the truth, to inquire whether an institution which excites the enthusiasm of such supporters is really answering the ends which they desire to promote.

With this latter class-those who believe that the Church is a divine institution, and has a divine message to deliver to mankind, and that the State only fulfils a primary duty in providing it with facilities for doing its work-the approval of Mr. Forster's speech, if there has been approval at all, has been much more qualified. It could not