Show SIX BILLIONS AN HOUR The Festive Bacteria Never in Want of Company Com-pany He Jnst Makes It In this age of wenderful Discoveries when every day adds a score or more new isms obes and cries to our language lan-guage when every breath of air contains > millions of microbes ana every bite of meat a whole menagerie of microscopic monstrosities it will be interesting to know exactly what bacteria are how they multiply and what they look like Tne great majority of these microscopic plants are what the botanists cail bacteria bacte-ria the smallest form of vegetable life So small are they that it would take in some cases as many as 15000 of them arranged ar-ranged in a row to extend one inch They have different forms some being round some ova some rodshaped while others are much the shape of a corkscrew In all cases they are so small that one needs a powerful microscope to examine them and in no case can we perceive them singly with the naked eye When countless millions of them are grouped together in a mass or colony we can see them about as we are able to see an approaching army of which ve are totally unable to distinguish a single soldier These bacteria move about and this is true of most of them although there are some which do not L L uO P1JI ear W > move at an DUS remain nxeu wherever they find a good feeding place Those that have motion behave in a very peculiar manner Some wobble about in one place without moving forward in the least others dart hither and thither back and forth at au apparently furious rate rocking and twirling about and turning turn-ing a hundred somersaults as they move along Bacteria multiply very rapidly and they do this in a very curious way A single one breaks itself into two then each half grows very rapidly until it becomes be-comes as large as tho original Then these in turn divide up again and so on until from a single one we have many thousands in a very short time To give the figures such as they are a single one can multiply at so enormous a rate that in fortyeight hours it can procuco something like 2SOOOOOOOOCO of its soecies Great consequences follow this enormous increase of bacteria for while one so small in itself can do but little harm the army resulting from such rapid multiplication makes it possible for them to accomplish a vast amount of damage |