1905.] on Fungi. 27 



bv Erxleben, 1818, Kiitzing, 1834, Cagnard Latour and Schwann, 

 1837. 



At the same time, the sketch included an outline of the first 

 great controversies regarding abiogenesis or spontaneous generation, 

 brought forward from its ancient strongholds in the ignorance of the 

 classical and mediaeval writers — e. g. Pliny, Bock, Yan Helmont — by 

 Needham in 1745, and confuted by Spallanzani, 1765-7G, Schultze, 

 1836, Schroder and Dusch, 1854 ; and to which the coup lU grace 

 was given by the work of Pasteur, 1862, Cohn, 1870-75, andTyndall. 



Information derived from the brewing of quass, saki, pulque, 

 kava, toddy, koumiss, mead, metheglin, spruce, and other beers and 

 wines by peoples all over the world has only confirmed the ideas, of 

 Pasteur especially, that all such fermentations are due to the presence 

 of fungi ; and although the discussions as to the process itself being 

 due to catalytic actions and the communication of internal move- 

 ments to the molecules of sugar broken up, initiated by Stahl in 

 1697, and revived in various forms by Liebig, 1839, and Naegeli, 

 1879, culminating in Buchner's views on the discovery of zymase in 

 1896-97, have modified the older forms of the vitalistic theory of 

 Cagnard Latour and Pasteur, they have not dissociated fermentation 

 from the life of the cell. 



The lecturer then passed to a survey of the enzymes, those re- 

 markable bodies which, though not themselves living, are capable of 

 breaking up organic substances apart from the protoplasm of the cells 

 which secrete them, and showed that since the discovery of diastase in 

 malt by Payen and Persoz in 1833, of pepsin in gastric juice by 

 Schwann in 1836, and of invertase in yeast by Berthelot in 1860, 

 numerous other special enzymes have been isolated, and all the 

 principal forms of sugar-inverting, starch-saccharifying, cellulose- 

 dissolving, fat-splitting, proteid-converting, and oxidising enzymes 

 occur in the fungi. Bourquelot has shown the presence of nine such 

 enzymes in Polyporus sulphureus, and of seven in Aspergillus alone. 



The presence of certain deadly poisons in putrefying fish, flesh, 

 etc., and the researches consequent on the increasing knowledge of 

 septic poisoning of wounds — with which Lister dealt so practically at 

 the time — led to researches which, in the hands of Brieger, Sonnen- 

 schein, Armand Gautier, Selmi, and others, resulted in the isolation 

 of more or less specific bodies, such as sepsin, cadaverine, ptomaines, 

 leucomaines, etc. In 1876 Neucki obtained an unusually pure form, 

 and the doctrine of ptomaine poisons may be regarded as thereby 

 estabUshed. 



For us, the point of interest here is that these poisons proved to 

 be analogous, if not identical as a class, with a number of vegetable 

 poisons, such as atropine, brucine, nicotine, strychnine, or at any rate 

 presented striking resemblances to them in their physiological actions. 



As close, or even closer, resemblances were found in the poisons 

 extracted from the fungi ; amanitin, bulbosin, cornutin, sphacelotoxin, 



