LIVING PICTURES OF MICROBES.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 362, 20 May 1911, Page 2

LIVING PICTURES OF MICROBES.

THE BACILLI OF DISEASE. Living pictures of microbes of one .fifty-thousandth of an inch in size were thrown on the screen for the first time at a demonstration helc the other day at the Broca Hospital in Paris by the aid of the new microcinematograph of Dr. Jean Comandon. Dr. Comandon's films had been taken with an ultra-micro-scopic apparatus at the rate of 32 a second, and the pictures obtained were magnified to from 10,000 to 20,000 diameters. Bacteriologistc revelled in the ocular demonstration of the life histories of the bacilli of typhus, sleeping sickness, and other diseases. The sight is described as marvellous, and at the same time terrifying. Lay spectators found it difficult to realise that they were witnsssing the life and death struggles of a world that lay until now beyond the power of the ordinary microscope. They saw hosts of fishlike and serpentine creatures raging to and fro, fighting for subsistence, giving birth to colonies of new creatures, and finally disappearing. One of the most interesting films showed the struggle between red and white blcod corpuscles. It looked like a celestial chart strewn with white nebulae, always in motion, becoming denser or fainter by degrees. Reddish patches appeared, each carrying a dragonlike creature, but the white nebulae surrounded the red forces and gradually absorbed them, the dragons fighting fiercely. The celestial chart was only a drop of chicken blood, and the defeat cf the red globules with their spirilla illustrated Metchnikotl's theory of the phagocytosis. Dr. Comandon's latest studies are concerned the effect of electric currents on bacilli. 1-Ie foun.l that under the influence of electricity blood corpuscles were attracted by the negative jiole, but microbes, trypsonoma and spirilla by the positive pole. In variously infected samples of blood some disease bacilli rushed to the positive, others again to the negative pole. These observations are believed by Professors Pozzi and Dastre to be of great value to biologists and the medical world generally, and Dr. Comandon has every hope of tracing other malignant microbes that have so far escaped detection owing to their atomic size.—Paris Letter.