Note 48 — Chapter XIV · WATER-SUPPLY AND DISEASE—CONCLUSIONS.

These experiments, so far as they have come to the notice of the author, have been made with water sterilized by heating, usually in small tubes stoppered with cotton-wool or other organic matter. In this case the water, no matter how carefully purified in the first place, becomes an infusion of organic matters capable of supporting bacterial growths, and not at all to be compared to natural waters.

In experiments often repeated under my direction, carefully distilled water in bottles, most scrupulously clean, with glass stoppers, and protected from dust, but not sterilized, has uniformly refused to support bacterial growths even when cautiously seeded at the start, and the same is usually true of pure natural waters. Some further experiments showed hardly any bacterial growth even of the most hardy water bacteria in a solution 1 part of peptone in 1,000,000,000 parts of distilled water, and solutions ten times as strong only gave moderate growths.