THE General Baptist Magazine. 66 JUNE, 1885. The Realm of the Infinitely Little. No. I. THE infinitely great has been abundantly made known through the searching eyes of the telescope. The infinitely little has yet to be revealed. The world still waits for the apocalyptic vision the microscope has undertaken to unfold. But the vision "will come, and will not tarry." Already invisible things are seen, the heralds of a new revelation have gone forth, gifted seers have been caught up into the third heaven of an entirely new realm, and they are beginning to write things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world." One of the most eminent savants in this realm of the infinitely little is M. Pasteur, whose life and labours have been given to us in an English translation this year. So much has this living scientist, this master of the experimental method, done for France, that a grateful people led him, but two or three years ago, in grand procession, with all his honours thick upon him, to the place of his nativity in the town of Dôle, and on the façade of the little dwelling where he first saw the light, he saw them fix a plate bearing in letters of gold the words "HERE WAS BORN LOUIS PASTEUR, His father, who had been an old soldier, and who on retiring from the army took up the trade of a tanner, was mightily fond of his little Louis. His one idea was to "make of him an educated man;" "and if," said he to his son, "if only you could become some day professor in the College of Arbois, I should be the happiest man on earth." The father's happiness was more than secured, for the son stretched forth his hand to honours of which his father had never dreamed. As with Faraday, his work became a passion with him. Lectures filled him with enthusiasm. Experiments absorbed his whole soul. His first researches were made in the science of crystallography. All the intensity of his nature was given up to it. Even his engagement to the daughter of the Rector of the Academy could scarce draw him from his loved pursuits; and unless some one had gone into his laboratory to remind him, he would have been found studying the nature of left-handed tartaric acid, when he ought to have been placing the ring on the third finger of the left hand of his bride. GENERAL BAPTIST Magazine, JUNE, 1885.-VOL. LXXXVII.-N.S. No. 18. 202 THE REALM OF THE At the age of thirty-two M. Pasteur forsook the study of molecular physics, and on his appointment as Dean of the Faculté des Sciences at Lille, he turned his attention to the subject of FERMENTATION. When M. Pasteur undertook the study of this theme, the prevailing theory was that fermentation was produced by the contact of nitrogenous substances with the oxygen of the air. Liebig was one of the ablest supporters of this theory. Pasteur soon came to a different conclusion. He found that ferments were living agents, but all bordering on the verge of invisibility, and all possessing unheard-of powers of multiplication. The lactic ferment, for instance, is formed of what seem little rods, scarcely a thousandth part of a millimeter in diameter-a millimeter being onetwenty-fifth of an inch. These infinitesimal rods reproduce themselves by fission, that is, they lengthen, become nipped in the centre so as to divide into two, the two then grow and divide in the same way, and so on, with such prodigious activity, that as in the case of the mycoderma aceti, twenty-four hours will suffice for a few almost invisible particles to cover with their kind an area of vinous liquid equal to the floorspace of a good-sized chapel. Millions upon millions of these tiny germs come to life in a single day. This discovery that life is the agent which carries out for us the processes of fermentation, putrefaction, and decay, has had to run the gauntlet of fierce opposition. But to-day it is a generally accepted truth that all fermentation is the work of micro-organisms preying upon dead matter, the micro-organisms themselves being preyed upon in turn, thus giving to us in the realm of the infinitely little a small scale representation of what goes on before our eyes, where "The heath eats up green grass and delicate flowers, Shall, greediest, triumph by the greed of all, We need not follow Pasteur in his researches concerning the diseases of wine and beer. For one, the writer is not concerned in having those diseases cured. He would be most rejoiced if the diseases of alcoholic drinks had no care. He wishes the whole tribe of such drinks was dead as a door-nail, yea, even as a coffin-nail. SPONTANEOUS GENERATION. On this subject theories the most absurd have at various times obtained credence. To mention one, and one only. The alchemist Van Helmont gave to the world, it is said, a "true recipe" for producing mice. His own eyes had witnessed the success of the experiment. He had seen a pot of full-grown mice brought into being in the course of twenty-one days by the sole and simple process of stuffing a dirty shirt into the mouth of a vessel containing a little corn. The fermentation INFINITELY LITTLE. 203 produced by the mixed odours of the corn and the shirt transmuted the grain into mice. But strange to say, nobody believed him. But what about the production of the well-nigh invisible things of which we have been speaking? May not vibrios, microbes, and the like come into being out of nothing? The answer is that neither mice nor microbes are born without parentage. M. Pouchet, director of the Museum of Natural History at Rouen, had in 1858 demonstrated, as he thought, before the Academy of Sciences, that certain forms of life had come into being in and of themselves, and not through the medium of previous germs of a similar kind. To prove it Pouchet devised a most ingenious experiment. To quote M. Radot-" He filled a bottle with boiling water, hermetically sealed it with the greatest care, and plunged it upside down into a basin of mercury. When the water was quite cold he uncorked the bottle under the metal, and introduced into it half a litre of pure oxygen gas, which is as necessary to the life of the smallest microscopic organism as it is to that of the larger animals and vegetables. Up to this time there was nothing in the vessel but pure water and oxygen. Pouchet then introduced a minute bunch of hay, which had been enclosed in a corked bottle, and exposed in a stove for a long time to a temperature of more than a hundred degrees. At the end of eight days a mouldiness was developed in this infusion of hay. Where does this come from?' cried Pouchet triumphantly. Certainly not from the oxygen, which had been prepared from a chemical compound at the temperature of incandescence. The water had been equally deprived of germs, since at the boiling temperature all germs would have been destroyed. The hay also could not have contained them, for that had been taken from a stove heated to a hundred degrees." To meet the objection that a hundred degrees of heat would not kill all germs (for some have been known to survive eight hours' boiling) Pouchet performed the experiment with hay heated to as high as three hundred degrees, with the same result. The experiment, therefore, seemed perfect and conclusive. But alas! for Pouchet's triumph. Pasteur had studied the infinitely little with so much care, that none knew better than he how small a matter might render such an experiment worthless. By experiments which cannot here be specified, he showed, and showed unmistakeably, that Pouchet had blundered-that he had removed all germs from the water and also from the hay, but that he had failed to remove the dust (only that) from the surface of the mercury into which he plunged his bottle, and that that dust contained life enough to breed millions of microscopic living beings. The conclusion to which he came, after all conceivable experiments had been tried, is the conclusion we may well accept, viz., that "there is not one circumstance known at the present day which justifies the assertion that microscopic organisms come into the world without germs or without parents like themselves. Those who maintain the contrary have been the dupes of illusions and of ill-conducted experiments, tainted with errors which they know not how either to perceive or to avoid. Spontaneous generation is a chimera." J. FLETCHER. Christianity in Syria. IN Syria the disciples of Jesus were first called Christians. From Syria the first missionaries of the gospel were sent forth by these "Christians" to the western world. To Syria they returned to give an account of their labours and successes. Probably the first translation of the Greek New Testament ever made was into the language of the Syrians; and a revised edition of that version, called the Peschito Syriac, is still highly prized by scholars. And the Christian historian to whom we are indebted more than to all others put together for our knowledge of early church history-Eusebius Pamphilus, Bishop of Cæsarea-was also a Syrian. These facts will, we trust, invest with interest this brief paper on the present state and prospects of Christianity in Syria. The name Syria was anciently used in a very wide sense, including a good part of Western Asia; and usage still varies as to the extent of country embraced by it. We shall understand by it the once Roman and now Turkish province of Syria, which includes Palestine, and is bounded on the West by the Mediterranean Sea, on the East by the Arabian Desert and the river Euphrates, on the North by the mountains of Asia Minor, and on the South by the Rocky Arabia. It is not a large country, nor is it thickly peopled, the population being roughly estimated at only about two millions. The principal cities are Aleppo, Damascus (one of the oldest cities in the world, the birthplace of Eliezer, Abraham's servant), Jerusalem, Jaffa (the ancient Joppa), Tripoli, and Beyrout, the place represented in our engraving. Beyrout, sometimes spelt Beiroot, is the most important seaport in Syria, having a population of upwards of 70,000. Its streets are wider than in most Eastern cities; it has bazaars, mosques, churches, monasteries, schools, and other public buildings; many of its houses are capacious and lofty; on the land side it is girt with a substantial wall, and the suburbs are very beautiful. To the east is the mountain range of Lebanon, and to the west the "great sea." Under the name of Berytus, from the third to the middle of the sixth century of the Christian era, Beyrout was the most famous school of Law in the world; but in the year 551 it was overthrown by an earthquake, and though after a time rebuilt, its glory as a seat of legal learning departed. Jn religion the majority of the natives of modern Syria, together with the Turkish soldiers and officials, are Mohammedans. Jews are numerous, particularly in Palestine. There is also a remarkable body of people called Druses, found chiefly among the mountains of Lebanon, and in the region called Hauran, to the south of Damascus. They take their name from El Drusi, a disciple of Hakem, Caliph of Egypt about the year 1017. They believe Hakem to have been the tenth, last, and most important incarnation of God, and render him Divine honours. Among the so-called Christian sects of Syria are the Maronites, numbering about 220,000, and having more than eighty convents and monasteries. These derive their name from a monk named John |