II. On schulze’s mode of intercepting the germinal matter of the air

Abstract

In “Poggendorf’s Annalen” for 1886, Franz Schulze described an experiment which has attained considerable celebrity. He placed in a flask a mixture of vegetable and animal matters and water; through the cork of the flask two glass tubes passed air-tight, each being bent at a right angle above the cork. He boiled the infusion; and while steam issued from the two glass tubes, he attached to each of them a group of Liebig’s bulbs, one group being filled with solution of caustic potash, and the other with concentrated sulphuric acid. Applying his mouth on the potash side, he sucked air daily through the sulphuric acid into the flask. But, though the process was continued from the end of May till the beginning of August, no life appeared. In this experiment, the germs diffused in the atmosphere are supposed to have been destroyed by the sulphuric acid, and doubtless this was the case. Other experimenters, however, in repeating the experiment of Schulze, have failed to obtain his results. The experiments of Dr. Hughes Bennett are a case in point, to which I might add certain failures of my own. Schulze’s success is, perhaps, in part to be ascribed to the purity of the air in which he worked; possibly, also, to extreme care in drawing the air into his flask; or, it may be, that the peculiar disposition of his experiment favoured him. Within the flask, as shown by his diagram, both his glass tubes terminated immediately under the cork, so that the air, entering by the one tube, was immediately sucked into the other, thus failing to mix completely with the general air of the flask.