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secure what he considers a fair price for a portion of his crop, or under the command of his factor or banker who wishes to secure his advances, sells future deliveries' of the coming crop. The spinner, on the other hand, wishing to secure his contracts for yarns, buys a 'future' delivery.

So far, these transactions, or similar ones which merchants may enter into, are within the bounds of unspeculative trading; but the fatal facility of trading in paper contracts-lying over two, four, or six months, or even for longer periods, without the dread necessity of having to provide one single penny to pay for the large value involvedhas developed an extent of speculation to which the term 'gambling' may be righteously applied. This is bad enough, for the irresponsibility of a great portion of the operators, unknown to the public, is continually setting home and foreign markets in courses for which no intelligible reason can be found by legitimate traders, and creating universal embarrassment and loss; but when to this is added operations of a gigantic nature, in which one man or a ring' deliberately sets to work to manipulate markets, effects are produced, the disastrous character of which cannot be measured, for the influences are so wide-spread, and touch so many various interests throughout the world. It is not the New York or English cotton markets which are alone affected. The electric telegraph flashes the fictitious values produced by these operations north, south, east, and west,-notifying in a few hours to the remotest corners of the globe what is going on, raising false hopes and producing needless despair-for what? The interest of one man, or a small group of men, to whom the operation may bring a profit, the value of which, as compared with the cost of the disturbance to the entire commercial world, is as a drop to a bucket of water.

In America, dealings in 'futures' are supposed to be covered by margins on contracts, or made secure by daily calls' for differences, and it may be supposed that the dealings are under some control as regards their extent; but such is not the case. The security of being able to enforce a call at any moment would appear to foster speculation, for it not unfrequently happens that over 250,000 bales (paper contracts) change hands in New York in one day!-a quantity representing a value of nigh 3,000,000l. sterling. In Liverpool and in all other European markets, on the other hand, the transactions are without any restriction whatever; the system prevailing everywhere has become. purely gambling' in produce, and brings the banished amusements of Homburg and Baden, and the existing excitement of Monaco, to our very doors.

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To continue the description of a cotton corner.' Suppose a ring,' having reason to believe that the body of speculators in 'futures' with which all markets are now crowded, have oversold 'deliveries' of cotton in a certain month, and that the stock of cotton likely to be

available for declarations on such contracts in that month can be manipulated and financed without superhuman difficulty, they (the ring) quietly proceed to 'sap' the enemy by buying up in every direction all the 'delivery' contracts for that month, and securing all the actual cotton they can lay hands on, thus putting a stop to all free movements; then, as the month in question comes round, the unwary sheep' find the walls of the fold closing round them day by day. They are unable to buy back their contracts, or purchase cotton to tender against them; prices rise daily, both of contracts and actual cotton, until the corner' is established, and the operators -having sucked the life-blood of the market--retire, and await another opportunity to twirl the market round their fingers.

Such a cotton corner' in October 1879 raised the value of cotton 11 to 13 per cent., and prices fell even a larger percentage within five days of the corner' being over. The same thing occurred in the month of August 1880, while at the present time a state of things exists which has produced widespread embarrassment. In a greater or less degree the same course goes on from month to month; but the foregoing instances are typical. The profits realised in a corner' are not easily ascertainable, neither are the losses; but it is no difficult task to estimate what the effect on the world's trade must be of violent and unnecessary fluctuation of 12 per cent. within the compass of a few days, and it certainly is reasonable to assume that the losses involved by such disorganisations vastly exceed the profits, for nothing disturbs the course of business so much as want of confidence.

The astuteness and boldness of operators, moreover, are constantly providing fictitious positions. In such courses lie their opportunities; and as there is no restriction upon the contracts they put out, or the contracts they buy in-as there are always buyers and sellers to command-the power to work evil is immense. There is rather more than a suspicion that manufacturers, who, with their operatives, are greatly affected by the existing corner,' have intensified its effect by their own unwary operations on the opposite tack.

The system of speculating in paper contracts is reduced to a science -no combination or brag' in the worst gambling games of cards is more skilful as conducted by those who know how to work it; necessity has compelled the brokers' associations of Europe and America to provide machinery, to clear the contracts, of the most elaborate and perfect kind. In proof of the statement that the vast bulk of the transactions is purely paper contract' dealing, it may be stated that not infrequently the dockets of the Liverpool cotton brokers' clearing house have been known to carry 100 to 150 declarations on a single tender of 100 bales of actual cotton; that is, transactions to the extent of 10,000 to 15,000 bales of cotton have been entered into by speculators on the basis of 100 bales of cotton from the time of its first sale to the date it goes into bonâ fide consumption

-100 to 150 transactions, 95 per cent. of which are purely unnecessary, untaxed, unrestricted, paying profits, and yielding losses! There is surely something not quite right here!-something that must be harmful in a moral and material sense to all engaged in the business, and to all great trade interests.

The frequent troubles between employers and the employed are doubtless greatly due to the constant disorganisations which unrestricted speculation in paper contracts is now producing. This point and the difficulties merchants and manufacturers suffer could well be enlarged upon, and submitted to actual proof; but the purpose of this article is to draw attention to a growing evil, and not to enter into over-much detail.

In conclusion it may be asked, Is this question without the pale of Government inquiry and restriction, or is business hereafter to be under the control of unrestricted speculation and gambling in paper contracts? That Government should interfere too much in trade matters is not to be advocated; but here is an instance in which large vested interests are thrown into contact with unnatural and unhealthy influences which not every manufacturer or trader has the mental quickness to grapple with, or the cool courage to wait patiently and 'let well alone.' The operations detailed strike far and wide into the very vitals of commerce; and surely, if the morals of a people require legislation, so should the trade of a country be fenced. from influences which are morally objectionable, apart from the material damage and disorganisation they cause.

It has been ordained by Parliament that bearing' bank shares is illegal; surely some restriction of the sort is called for in dealings with produce upon which the whole manufacturing industry of this country and of the world is based. It is not needful for commercial purposes that the cotton crop should be turned over twelve times in one year on mere paper contracts, or more hog produce sold than all the hogs in America for several years would yield, or Parisian beetroot sugar warrants dealt in to the extent of several times the annual outturn of the entire Continent.

WILLIAM B. HALIED.

VOL. X.-No. 56.

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DISEASE-GERMS.

AMONG the distinguished men who came together at the recent International Medical Congress-a gathering altogether unexampled for its combination of great and varied ability, and worthily representative of almost every country in which medicine is studiedthere was no one whose presence was more universally or more cordially welcomed, than a quiet-looking Frenchman, who is neither a great physician, a great surgeon, or even a great physiologist; but who, originally a chemist, has done more for medical science than any savant of his day. And this, not only (probably not so much) through the results already attained by Pasteur himself and by others working on his ideas-great though these results are; but through the entirely new direction he has given to scientific inquiry, the number of new paths of research he has opened out, and of new clues he has afforded to those who will follow them up; and, last but by no means least, by the admirable example he has afforded, in the strictness and severity of his own methods (which have made him almost unerring in his predictions, and have given his conclusions the force of demonstrations), to those who would carry on the same lines of inquiry.

And here I would stop to note, as honourable to the disinterested character of a Profession which has been lately the object of violent abuse for its (alleged) selfish and mercenary spirit, that this unique welcome was given, not to a great physician who had discovered a cure for gout, cancer, or consumption, by the use of which it would be enriched-not to a bold surgeon who had brought into vogue some wonderful operation, the success of which would tend to its renown-but to the scientific investigator of the causes of disease, whose work belongs altogether to the domain of preventive medicine, and thus, so far from being likely to benefit its members pecuniarily, tends only to diminish their remunerative employment. I never felt so proud of belonging to the body which still does me the honour to recognise me as one of its members, as I did when Sir James Paget, the President of the Congress, paused in his opening address, to point out on the platform behind him the greatest living exemplar of the truths he was so admirably enforcing; and when the whole of his vast audience-the like of which had never before been

gathered in St. James's Hall, and perhaps never will be again— enthusiastically cheered, not once only, but again and again, the scientific veteran whose renown has spread from his quiet Parisian laboratory over the whole civilised world.

In order that the last of Pasteur's great achievements-which, with some of the ideas it suggests, it is my object now to bring before the readers of the Nineteenth Century-may be properly appreciated, it will be well for me to sketch out briefly what has been the nature of his lifework, from the time when the singular beauty of some of his Chemico-physical researches (which obtained for him in 1856 the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society) marked him out as one likely to attain further distinction.

It seems to have been by his special interest in the chemistry of Organic substances, that he was early led to examine into the question of fermentation; which had come to present an entirely new aspect through the discovery of Cagniard de la Tour that yeast is really a plant belonging to one of the lowest types of fungi, which grows and reproduces itself in the fermentable fluid, and whose vegetative action is presumably the cause of that fermentation, just as the development of mould in a jam-pot occasions a like change in the upper stratum of the jam, on whose surface, and at whose expense, it lives and reproduces itself. Chemists generally-especially Liebig, who had a fermentation-theory of his own-pooh-poohed this idea. altogether; maintaining the presence of the yeast-plant to be a mere concomitant, and refusing to believe that it had any real share in the process. But in 1843, Professor Helmholtz, then a young undistinguished man, devised a method of stopping the passage of organic germs from a fermenting into a fermentable liquid, without checking the passage of fluids; and as no fermentation was then set up, he drew the inference that the particulate' organic germs, not the soluble material of the yeast, furnish the primum mobile of this change,―a doctrine which, though now universally accepted, had to fight its way for some time against the whole force of chemical authority.'

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A little before Cagniard de la Tour's discovery, a set of investigations had been made by Schulze and Schwann, to determine whether the exclusion of air was absolutely necessary to prevent the appearance of living organisms in decomposing fluids, or whether these fluids might be kept free from animal or vegetable life, by such means as would presumably destroy any germs which the air admitted to them might bring in from without, such as passing it through a red-hot tube or strong sulphuric acid. These experiments, it should be said, had reference rather to the question of spontaneous generation' or 'abio

1 It was, I remember, in or about that year, that Professor Liebig's visit to England gave me the opportunity of showing him some yeast under a high power of the microscope. He said that he had not before seen its component cells so distinctly.