24o SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



organised ferments, some of which were merely moulds or 

 mildews. He found that by carefully decanting wines 

 from the lees, and then heating them up to about 140 9 F. 

 they would keep very well, an organic ferment being 

 destroyed at this temperature, so that if the bottles were 

 carefully corked no decomposition would take place in 

 the wine, which would remain in a perfectly sound condi- 

 tion. This process of Pasteurisation, as it is called, has 

 been adopted with success in the sterilisation of milk, and 

 of other substances that would be spoiled by being subjected 

 to the action of a higher temperature. 



Pasteur's researches on the silk-worm disease commenc- 

 ing in 1865 were the first that can be said to have definitely 

 and conclusively proved by rigid experiment the constant 

 connection between a particulate and living organism, and a 

 specific disease. Pasteur's previous investigations in the 

 domain of specific fermentations, to each of which he 

 assigned a specific ferment-inducing micro-organism, and 

 his further experiments from which he concluded that not 

 only must there be a living seed from which living organisms, 

 however low in the scale, can spring, but each form of 

 organism must have its ultimate origin in forms like itself, 

 had prepared his mind for this investigation. Before he 

 commenced his work on the silk-worm farms at Alais 

 Pasteur had never even handled a silk-worm, but at the 

 request of his old master, M. Dumas, he determined to do 

 what he could to help what was fast becoming a crippled 

 industry on account of the fearful ravages of pibrine 

 amongst the silk- worms. He at once turned his attention 

 to certain small corpuscles that had already been found in 

 diseased silk-worms and moths and their eggs by Italian 

 Naturalists. It had even been proposed that the eggs of 

 the silk-worms should be examined under the microscope 

 in order that only those in which these corpuscles were 

 absent might be hatched, but nothing had come out of this 

 suggestion. Pasteur went to work in his usual methodical 

 but energetic fashion. First the presence of the corpuscles 

 was demonstrated in the egg, the worm, the chrysalis, and 

 the moth. It might sometimes be missed in the earlier 



