THE GARDEN OF DEATH.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 12059, 14 July 1917, Page 6

THE GARDEN OF DEATH.

BREEDING MILLIONS OF GERMS. Perhaps the most remarkable garden in the world is to be found in one of the tower rooms of tho American Museum of Natural History, New York. All tho casual visitor would notice in this strange garden would be, instead of the ordinary rows of flower beds, rows and rows of test tubes in neatly-arranged and classified, wooden racks. A somewhat closer inspection would chow in each tube a sort of jelly. On the slanting surface of tho jelly is what looks like a smear of whitish posvo in some tubes, while in itlooks like a. wrinkled mass of moist brown paper. The smear or tho wrinkled mass in each case is a growth ot microbes, millions oi them; and the collection is a garden of living germs, enough to destroy every living creature on earth! These minutest of plaffits need careful tending. Most of the in grow on a, jelly made with meat, peptone and the extract- I'rotn a Japanese seaweed--agar. Some, however, require very special loods, as variously and exactly compounded as tlioso that are preparer] in tho kitchen of a hospital. Some must have egg. seme Mood, some milk, some salts or special kinds. Some need air, while others must be cultivated in tubes from which oxygen has beert removed by special chemical means. I Some will live for weeks without attention, while; others must bo transferred to a fresh tube of foo-d jelly every three days. A laboratory helper is busy all tho tinio preparing the cult/lire media tor these small hut exactin£jplants, while tho bacteriologist in charge is quite fully occupied in transferring them, at tho proper time, hv touching tho old group with the, tip oi a platinum needle, which carries an invisible but potent speck of bacteria- to the new tube. Some of the plants—the typhoid bacillus, for example—are so small that -!00,000.GOO could be packed into a grain of granulated sugar. In this room, somewhat grimly-called garden, there are plants of germs representing practically ell known types. Bubonic plague, the most dangerous disease known to man, lias alone _ been excluded, on account of accidents which havo occurred in other laboratories with this peculiarly deadly germ. Typhoid and diphtheria germs, however, are to be louiul will', those of whooping-cough ;anu ehuicra. mtvningitis and leprosy, influenza and pneumonia. in tho collection are also tho bacteria which cause plant diseases and those which decompose foods. There ai'e strains of the Bulgarian bacillus which makes buttermilk, and the he-tie acid bacteria utilised by tho tanner. One germ thai in feci s sugarcane) came from Louisiana.. and another was found fixing nitrogen in tho soil of a beaniield in the .Middle West.