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When I had risen from the microscope table, Wotherspoon took me over to one of the benches before the window and showed me the glass vessels containing the pinkish gelatine. These slabs, he told me, were cultures of bacteria. One placed a few organisms on the gelatine and there they grew and multiplied enormously.

“These specimens here,” said Wotherspoon, “are not the same variety as the ones on the microscope slide. They have nothing whatever to do with disease; and yet, as I told you, they have an influence upon animal life. I suppose you never heard of nitrifying and denitrifying bacteria?”

I admitted that the names were unfamiliar to me.

“Just so. Few people seem to take any interest in these vital problems. Now you do know that internally we swarm with all sorts of germs, noxious in some cases, beneficent in others; but I suppose it never struck you that our bodies form only a trifling part of the material world; and that outside these living islets there is space for all sorts of microscopic flora and fauna to grow and multiply? And need these creatures be absolutely isolated from the interests of animals? Not at all.