Even yet, however, we are far from a scientific classification for bacteria. Nor is this matter for surprise. The development in this branch of biology has been so rapid that it has been impossible to assimilate the facts collected. The facts themselves by their remarkable variety have not aided classification. Names which a few years ago were applied to individual species, like _Bacillus subtilis_, or _Bacterium termo_, or _Bacillus coli_, are now representative, not of individuals, but of families and groups of species. Again, isolated characteristics of certain microbes, such as motility, power of liquefying gelatine, size, colour, and so forth, which at first sight might appear as likely to form a basis for classification, are found to vary not only between similar germs, but in the same germ. Different physical conditions have so powerful an influence upon these microscopic cells that their individual characters are constantly undergoing change. For example, bacteria in old cultures assume a different size, and often a different shape, from younger members of precisely the same species; _Bacillus pyocyaneus_ produces a green to olive colour on gelatine, but a brown colour on potato; the bacillus of Tetanus is virulently pathogenic, and yet may not act thus unless in company with certain other micro-organisms. Hence it will at once appear to the student of bacteriology that, though there is great need for classification amongst the six or seven hundred species of microbes, our present knowledge of their life-history is not yet advanced enough to form more than a provisional arrangement.
We know that bacteria are allied to moulds on the one hand and yeasts on the other, and that they have no differentiation into root, stem, or leaf; we know that they are fungi (having no chlorophyll), in which no sexual reproduction occurs, and that their mode of multiplication is by division. From such facts as these we may build up a classification as follows:--
VEGETABLE KINGDOM. | +---------------+--------+-------+------------------+ | | | | Thallophyta. Muscineæ. Pteridophyta. Phanerogamia. [= The lowest forms of vegetable life. No differentiation into root, stem, or leaf.] | Protophyta. [= No sexual reproduction.] | +-------+------------+ | | Algæ. Fungi. [= Chlorophyll [= No chlorophyll.] present.] | | +--+--+--+--+--+--+ | | | | | | | | Schizomycetes { (1) Coccaceæ[4]--round cells. [= multiplication by cell { division or by spores] { (2) Bacteriaceæ--rods and threads. { or { (3) Leptotricheæ. } Bacteria. { } Higher Bacteria. { (4) Cladotricheæ. }