The Transmutation of Bacteria

Abstract

THIS small book deals with certain variations, I morphological and physiological, which are encountered amongst pathogenic bacteria. The word “transmutation” is employed by the author to indicate the transformation of members of one recognised species into those of another, and he refers in detail to the arbitrary methods hitherto employed by bacteriologists for the differentiation of bacterial species. Apart from two or three pages in which the author's own experimental work is briefly described, the book is mainly a study of bacteriological literature in the English language. A large part of the abundant publications in foreign languages is either not dealt with at all, or is analysed from English abstracts. There is a good deal of reiteration, certain observations, often obsolete, being utilised again and again in different parts of the book. The use of the apostrophe in “Aertryck's bacillus” seems to indicate that the name is that of a man instead of that of a place. The last chapter, entitled “The Enzyme Theory of Disease,” deals with the idea that most of the attributes of pathogenic bacteria can be referred to the activities of ultra-microscopic bodies of the nature of enzymes, and the author considers that this may be the means by which bacteria may exchange many of their characters and functions without themselves undergoing transformation.

The Transmutation of Bacteria.

Dr.

S.

Gurney-Dixon

By. Pp. xviii + 179. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1919.) Price 10s. net