lengthy treatises on the origin of language and the classification of concepts. Chinese religion also is a subject well worth the serious. attention of the theologian, and the very contrast between their philosophy and our own might teach us at least that one useful lesson that there is more to be learnt even there than is dreamt of in our philosophy.

If the facts which I have so far placed before you are true, what follows? It follows that Oriental scholarship must no longer rely on the old saying that distance lends enchantment to the scene. Mere distance, mere antiquity, mere strangeness, will not secure to it a lasting hold on our affections.

Unless the scholar has a heart, and unless he can discover something in the ancient world that appeals to our hearts, his labour will be in vain. The world will pass by, after a cursory glance at our mummies, and will take its lantern, if possibly it may find a man, somewhere else. It is sometimes supposed that physical science as distinguished from historical science, the study of the works of nature as kept apart from the study of the works of man, possesses great advantages. It deals with tangible facts, it clears up many mysteries, and it often leads to useful and lucrative discoveries. All that is true. But I confess I wonder how my old friend M. Renan, who has done so much to make the study of Eastern antiquity a living study, could have expressed a regret at having dedicated his life and energies to Oriental languages and not to chemistry. Man has been, is, and always will be, the centre of the world, the measurer of all things. Take even the chemist's atoms. Who made them? who thought and named them? Nature gives us no atoms. Nature knows nothing that is not divisible. Man postulated atoms in spite of nature; and that fundamental concept, that belief in the infinite, in the infinitely small, as well as in the infinitely great, is more important to a thoughtful student than the whole table of atoms of the chemist.

It is man who has to find the key to all the mysteries of nature, and when all these mysteries have been solved, there still remains the greatest mystery of all mysteries-man. However much we may forget it when absorbed in minute researches, man is, and will always remain, the hidden subject of all our thoughts.

Philosophers imagine that they can study man in the abstract, or that they are able to discover all his secrets by introspection. Much, no doubt, has been achieved by that method; but, at the very best, all it can teach us is what man is, not how man has come to be what he is. To solve this problem, the most important of all problems that concern us, our age has discovered a new method, the historical method. What is called the Historical School has taken possession not only of philosophy, but likewise of the wide fields of language, mythology, religion, customs, and laws. The study of all

these subjects has been completely reformed—has received a fresh foundation and a new life by being based on historical research, and by being pervaded by the historical spirit.

Here, then, in the study of the past lies the bright future of Oriental studies. Let Oriental scholars remember that they have to work for a great object, and let them never mistake the means for the end. That is the danger that besets Oriental more than any other studies. It is, no doubt, very creditable to learn to read hieroglyphics, to understand cuneiform inscriptions, to decipher the language of the Vedic hymns, to read Arabic, Persian, or Hebrew. But unless, while engaged in our special studies, whatever they may be, we can contribute some stones, however small, to the building of that temple which is dedicated to the knowledge of man, and therefore to the knowledge of God, we are but beasts of burden, carrying, it may be, heavy loads, but throwing them down by the road, where they are more likely to impede than to help the progress of true knowledge. Give us men who are not only scholars but thinkers, men like Sir W. Jones and Colebrooke in England, like Champollion and Eugène Burnouf in France, like Schlegel and Humboldt in Germany, and Oriental scholarship will soon take the place that of right belongs to it among the studies of mankind. Man loves man. Discover what is truly human, not only what is old, in India, Persia, Arabia, in Babylon and Nineveh, in Egypt-aye, and in China also— and Oriental studies will not only become popular-that may be worth very little-but they will become helpful to the attainment of man's highest aim on earth, which is to study man, to know man, and, with all his weaknesses and follies, to learn to love man.

F. MAX MÜLLER.

1

THE REALM OF THE MICROBE.

AT a time when the world is filled with excitement over the latest discovery by Koch, it may not be without interest to review the progress of micro-biological study, and direct attention more particularly to the place where the chemist unexpectedly struck the high road of medicine, and came upon the first stray wanderers pursuing corresponding researches among the intricacies of the lower fungi.

Within this third realm,' as Dumas calls the borderland between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, we must allow our minds to carry us into the region of the invisible, for we have to realise the fact that the air round about us is crowded with the germs, in every stage. of vitality, of small organisms which are noiseless, intangible, unseen. While sleeping, waking, eating or drinking, they steal so insidiously upon us that we are unconscious of their presence until illness gives the first note of warning.

But before plunging deeper into the still unfathomed depths of the causes of disease, let us for a moment try to form some slight conception of what constitutes primitive life. As we are going back to the earliest beginnings of living things we must start from the thin line which divides the animate from the inanimate. To raise one of those primitive forms of life from its slimy home we have only to tie a piece of muslin over a water faucet1 and allow the water to trickle slowly through it for a few hours. If we examine under the microscope the scum which remains we bring before our vision one of the oldest inhabitants of our globe, the celebrated Amoeba.

Looking like a bit of animated jelly, it is composed of a single cell, it is perfectly transparent, and scarcely distinguishable under the microscope from the water in which it lives, moves, and has its being. It rolls itself onward, searching for morsels of imperceptible food, which it draws into its transparent interior to digest at leisure. This curious little primitive being has everything to do for itself without any of the usual apparatus for doing it. To catch its food it has to improvise arms by protruding parts of its body out here and there, drawing them in again with perchance some little prey. It seems never at a loss, for without a stomach it digests, without lungs

Prudden's Story of the Bacteria.

it breathes, and without sex it multiplies by dividing its minute body into still minuter portions. These, like the parent, become perfectly independent beings, and almost as soon as born-if I may say so— give birth to others again. At the extreme other end of the biological scale we find that in man life also originates in a single cell, with the important difference that it divides and subdivides, and forms into clusters of cells, which form into layers, till in the final grouping of specialised cells we have the highest order of being.2

Thus all living things throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms are composed of cells, springing in the first instance from one single cell. Now the infinitely small beings which do so much good, or may do so much harm, in our everyday lives, are all cells in their primitive condition, and, although such ancient inhabitants of our globe, have only recently emerged from their obscurity to startle the world with the knowledge of their presence.

Where Pasteur first stepped in was to prove that not only did water teem with microscopic life which had long been under observation, but that the air around us was likewise filled with invisible germs of every kind: some carrying on the business of scavengers; others of the utmost importance in the work and industries of man. Without laying claim to be the first discoverer of germs in connection with disease, he was the first to recognise the vast importance of these minute organisms in the economy of nature. It was while working at molecular physics that the germ theory took root in his mind, and caused him to pursue the studies on fermentation which eventually led to the investigation of ferment (zymotic) diseases affecting human beings, and cattle. He considered fermentations, properly so called, as chemical phenomena, co-relative with physiological actions of a peculiar nature, and regarded fermentation as a necessary consequence of the manifestation of life, when that life takes place without the direct combustion due to free oxygen. He argued that

all that has lived must die, and all that is dead must be disintegrated, dissolved, or gasefied; the elements which are the substratum of life must enter into new cycles of life. If things were otherwise, the matter of organised beings would encumber the surface of the earth, and the law of the perpetuity of life would be compromised by the gradual exhaustion of its materials. One grand phenomenon. presides over this vast work, the phenomenon of fermentation.3

What, then, is the cause of fermentation?

In order to answer this profound question Pasteur devoted himself to the study of the microscopic beings, which he finally divided

2 Haeckel's Evolution of Man. The human organism, like that of the higher animals, exists for a short time in this simplest conceivable form. The entire human child, with all its great future possibilities, is in this stage only a simple ball of protoplasm-monerula.'

3 M. Valery Radot, Vie d'un Sarant.

into two great classes, the aerobies and the anaerobies, those which require free oxygen for their existence, and those which are killed by the presence of free oxygen, although able to wrest oxygen from the materials whence they derive their nourishment.

The aerobies are those which begin work on the surface of things, their mission being to clear the earth by a process of slow combustion of all that is dead. The anaerobies working simultaneously spring into activity underneath the surface of putrescible matter, and, dying on exposure to the free oxygen of the air, are in their turn swept away by the aerobies on the surface.1

Thus the two great classes of minute living organisms co-operate towards the fulfilment of a common end, the one beginning work which the other takes up and completes. But for their united efforts we should cease to live, for the earth would be littered with fallen débris and organic matter of every kind, all of which it is their duty to transmute into the very elements which are essential to life again. In the parts of the earth where these organisms do not exist there is no vegetation, no organic matter, no life of any kind; the region is one vast field of ice, a sandy desert, or an expanse of eternal When perchance these desolate places are invaded by living creatures who starve and fall by the way, there is no decay, for the organisms whose office is that of putrefaction, are not present to perform their analytical functions. Hence the work of clearance falls to the vultures of the air or the stray wanderers within the arctic zone, and failing their presence the dead lie for ever intact.

snow.

Thus the destruction of everything that has lived reduces itself to the simultaneous action of these three great natural phenomena: fermentation, putrefaction, and slow combustion. The carbon, the hydrogen, the nitrogen of organic matters are transformed by the oxygen of the air, and by the action of these aerobies, into carbonic acid, vapour of water, and ammonia gas. In the final analysis these creatures represent life in its eternal form, for life is the germ, and the germ is life."

Having thus recognised the vast importance of these minute organisms, Pasteur the chemist watched with unceasing interest the work of these greater chemists in Nature's own laboratory. Not only were they engaged in the immense business of preserving the balance between life and death, but they participated largely in the everyday work of the world and were taking an active part in the industries of man. Any chemical experiments performed in the laboratory, however perfect the human means at hand, are clumsy and laborious compared to the chemical changes effected in the simple, natural order of events by these lowly and invisible creatures. Their power is so enormous that they are well called the masters

It is perhaps necessary to explain that the spores only of these organisms are carried about in the air, and develop and multiply only on finding a suitable soil. 5 Radot's lie d'un Sarant.