Page 109 - My FlipBook

This is perhaps sufficient to give you a view of these
physiological processes by which we may explain the
phenomena of micro-organisms. Remember distinctly that
they differ from the higher plants in this : Their function is
to destroy ; the function of the higher plants is to build. In
this we have, when dividing the highest from the lowest, a
sharp distinction between their functions in the universe;
the higher organisms are builders, while the lower de-
stroy. If we undertook to trace from one to the other and
find a distinct demarcation between these, we would have
difficulty in doing it, because they glide into each other so
imperceptibly. And yet, between the oak and that micro-
organism that destroys the oak, there seems to be a wide
gulf—;-the one designed to build a great structure, the other
designed to destroy it. These lower organisms build but
very little ; they are exceedingly small ; they go to pieces
readily. In the little building that they do, they destroy
great amounts of material, from much of waste product, both
gaseous, many of them, and fluid or soHd, and the chemical
formulae of these waste products approach closely the
chemical formulae of inorganic compounds. If we had no
micro-organisms our bodies would not be decomposed ; the
bodies of animals that grow upon the earth would not be
decomposed ; the bodies of trees that constitute the forests
might die and stand, or even fall, and cover in the earth, but
they would not decompose ; they would not be changed
chemically back to earth, air and water from which they
came. The micro-organism is the provision of Nature for
the decomposition of these growths, a provision that is re-
quired to continue life upon the planet, for the earth would
be covered in with these great structures, with these great
masses of the growth of higher animals and higher plants,
and would become in a few centuries uninhabitable from the
mass of material that had gathered upon it. The micro-
organism, then, is the provision for the destruction of these
and the return of the elements of which they are composed
back to earth, air and water, from which they came. Now,
the great bulk of micro-organisms that we find are engaged
in this work. It is only the few that we study in medicine.
It is only the few that are parasites and grow in animals and
in plants, that grow in living bodies. These seem to have

97