ns of preserved meat, fruit, and
vegetables, by the hypothesis that fermentation has begun in such
tins, that gases have been generated, the pressure of which has
stifled the incipient life and stopped its further development.
[Footnote: _Beginnings of Life_, vol. i.] This is the new
theory of preserved meats. Had its author pierced a tin of preserved
meat, fruit, or vegetable under water with the view of testing its
truth, he would have found it erroneous. In well-preserved tins he
would have found, not an outrush of gas, but an inrush of water. I
have noticed this recently in tins which have lain perfectly good for
sixty-three years in the Royal Institution. Modern tins, subjected to
the same test, yielded the same result. From time to time, moreover,
during the last two years, I have placed glass tubes, containing clear
infusions of turnip, hay, beef, and mutton, in iron bottles, and
subjected them to air-pressures varying from ten to twenty-seven
atmospheres--pressures, it is needless to say, far more than
sufficient to tear a preserved meat tin to shreds. After ten days
these infusions were taken from their bottles rotten with putrefaction
and teeming with life. Thus collapses an hypothesis which had no
rational foundation, and which could never have seen the light had the
slightest attempt been made to verify it.

Our fifty-four vacuous and pellucid flasks also declare against the
heterogenist. We expose them to a warm Alpine sun by day, and at night
we suspend them in a warm kitchen. Four of them have been
accidentally broken; but at the end of a month we find the fifty
remaining ones as clear as at the commencement. There is no sign of
putrefaction or of life in any of them. We divide these flasks into
two groups of twenty-three and twenty-seven respectively (an accident
of counting rendered the division uneven). The question now is
whether the admission of air can liberate any generative energy in the
infusions. Our next experiment will answer this question and
something more. We carry the flasks to a hayloft, and there, with a
pair of steel pliers, snip off the sealed ends of the group of
three-and-twenty. Each snipping off is of course followed by an
inrush of air. We now carry our twenty-seven flasks, our pliers, and
a spirit-lamp, to a ledge overlooking the Aletsch glacier, about 200
feet above the hayloft, from which ledge the mountain falls almost
precipitously to the north-east for abou