A Battle in a Bottle.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIII, Issue 24, 15 December 1909, Page 62

A Battle in a Bottle.

Soon after the opening of the Medical Exhibition at the Horticultural Hall, Westminster, London, the first week of last month, a large glass bottle which had been betraying symptoms of uneasiness exploded and scattered its contents, a creamy foam, over the rest of the stall of Messrs. A. H. Cox and Co. Originally the bottle contained milk—just milk and a few million typhoid bacilli which lived and grew happily together in this culturemedium. Then, for demonstration purposes, a horde of 10,000,000 hungry monsters (known as the bacilli of Massol) were introduced into the cultured civilisation of the unhappy typhoid tribes, and. remorseless war was raging in a moment. A storm in a teacup was nothing to the battle in the bottle. The milk grew turgid with the bodies of tho slain, and still the Massol militia murdered and devoured their victims. When a Massol bandit had filled himself to bursting point—he burst, and each of his SOO,OOO or 1,000,000 fragments became' a ■hungry young Massol 'bacillus which fought and ate in turn. Finally the milk foamed up with the rapidly multiplying generations of Massolites and the bottle exploded. The demonstration arose out of Professor Metehnikofi’s claim that the bacillus of lactic acid (the Massol bacillus) destroys the bacilli which cause internal putrefaction of. food. The Ma-ssol ■bacillus, he holds, by rendering the internal organs antiseptic lengthens a man’s life to an extraordinary extent, and he quotes the exceptional number of centenarians in Bulgaria, where the in-

habitants . live largely on soured milk, which contains this bacillus. Massol bacilli are no.v presented in a novel form—that of chocolate . creams, each containing 10,000,000 bacilli, and it was one of these chocolate creams which caused .such havoc among the innocent typhoid microbes in the bottle.