2%6 Proceedings. 



Ordinary Meeting, April 30th, 1889. 



Professor OsBORNE REYNOLDS, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S., 

 President, in the Chair. 



Mr. Alderman VV. H. Bailey read a paper " On the 

 Ancient Canoe recently found near Barton, in one of the 

 cuttings for the Manchester Ship Canal," and exhibited 

 sections and diagrams. 



A paper on " The Fermentation Theories," by ALFRED 

 Springer, Ph.D., of Cincinnati, U.S.A., was communicated 

 by Mr. WiLLIAM Grimshaw. The author called at- 

 tention to the following points: (i) The exciters of 

 fermentation are minute organisms reduced to a single 

 cell ; (2) Ferments, like all other living things, are subject 

 to physiological, or, more specially, pathological func- 

 tions of life ; (3) They are so sensitive that any abnormal 

 influence either changes their whole mode of existence, 

 or destroys it altogether; (4) A medium suitable to the 

 life of one special kind is changed by it into products 

 which cease to sustain it, but can nourish a lower class of 

 organisms, thereby making analyses, made at different times, 

 vary in their results. We cannot class such reactions with 

 those chemical ones taking place according to the laws of 

 equivalents. The author summed up Pasteur's "oxygen- 

 abstracting theory" of fermentation as "life without free 

 oxygen." In organic cells there resides a special force 

 capable of producing chemical reactions. This force reveals 

 its activity by decompositions effected upon complex mole- 

 cules. It is motion communicated by vital force, and 

 dependent upon it. Naegeli's theory that "Fermentation 

 IS the transmission of the molecular motion of the different 



