Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 19, Number 87, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 July 1898 — DECAY OF ANIMAL MATTER. [ARTICLE]

DECAY OF ANIMAL MATTER.

It Is Somethin? More Than n Simple Chemical Change. A great many proofs, now more or less familiar to most people, show quite clearly that the decay of animal or vegetable matter is not a simple chemical change, inevitable in the nature of things, but a violent interference with the natural course on the part of hostile organisms, says Longman’s Magazine. The bacteria, which produce decomposition, are very minute plants, which grow, like mushrooms or molds, upon organic matter, and which reproduce their like with incredible rapidity. Tyndall showed long ago that the spores of these plants exist in myriads in the air, floating everywhere around us; that they occupy all crannies and empty places on the surface of the earth, and that they swarm in their millions in all ponds and puddles. An easy way of proving that these spores alone, and the plant colonies which spring from them, are the cause of putrefaction may be obtained by boiling beef tea in a test tube, so as to kill the bacteria, and then, white the liquid is still steaming, closing up the mouth of the tube with a plug ofootton wool, which admits the air but strains out the germs of the putrefactive organisms. Under these conditions the beef tea will keep good for years, but if you remove the plug it wilj begin at once to putrefy.