Page 142 - Ethel D. Hume - Bešam ili Paster: Izgubljeno poglavlje u istoriji biologije

NATURE'S EXPERIMENTS 139

invasion. In the sugared solutions, whieh he had used
when arriving at the conclusions embodied in his Beacon
Experiment of 1857, he had seen the invaders increase and
multiply; but now, in the plant interiors, they were in
contact with organisms as fully alive as they were. After
inoculation, increasing swarms of bacteria were indeed
observed, but Bechamp had cause to believe that these
were not direct descendants of the invaders. He became
convinced that the invasion from without disturbed the
inherent microzymas and that the multiplying bacteria
he noted in the interior of the plants were, to use his own
words, 1 "the abnormal development of constant and
normal organisms."
Thus, these experiments, which Nature herself had
carried out in the Montpellier Botanical Gardens, were to
have far-reaching effects upon Professor Bechamp's
pathological teaching. They were to prevent his jumping
to hasty conclusions like those, for instance, formulated by
Pasteur, who imagined animal and vegetable tissues and
fluids to be mere inert chemical media 2 like the sweetened
solutions in which Bechamp first displayed the part played
by air-borne organisms.
These botanical observations were made by Bechamp at
an important epoch when the subject of bacteria was
beginning to attract much attention. He made his special
study of frost-bitten plants at the commencement of the
same year, 1868, in which, later, on the 19th October,
Pasteur, at the early age of 45, had the misfortune to be
struck down by severe paralysis, brought about, he de-
clared, by "excessive toil" in connection with silk-worm
disease. But before this, as we have seen, the celebrated
chemist had worked hard to exalt the role of what he
called the germs of the air and to take to himself the credit
of the discovery. His pupils and admirers were content
1
Comptes Rendus de VAcademie des Sciences 66, p. 863.
2
"M. Pasteur ne voyait dans un ceuf, dans le sang, dans le lait, dans une masse
musculaire, que des substances naturelles telles que la vie les ilabore et qui ont les
vertus de transformation que V ebullition detruit." Les Microzymas, par A. Be'champ,
p. 15. (Avant-Propos.)