EHRENBERG ON ORGANIC MOLECULES AND ATOMS. 571 



orgauic nature" (p. 352). " Globules of milk and blood are Zymom ; 

 gelatine, caseum, starch, sugar, &c., contain Zymom" (p. 350). 

 " Silica first takes a vegetable formation, and from the Zymom formed 

 by this process originates further animal life" (p. 358). " Vegetable 

 substance can be immediately changed into an infusorium" (p. 360). 

 " From Zymom may be produced, when favourable conditions concur, 

 infusoria of this or that form" (p. 358). "The first infusorium, the 

 lowest animal creature, is a living Zymom globule" (p. 358). "Zymom 

 is in a certain relation an egg " (p. 360). " The yolk of an egg con- 

 sists merely of Zymom combined with slime " (p. 357). " This is no 

 hypothesis but a fact" (p. 361) ! 



That the commencement of many organisms is an action of putre- 

 faction or of fermentation, and therefore a chemical process, is a very 

 ancient opinion, and could not fail to be revived in a refined form.. 

 M. Gruithuisen has in the eighth volume of Gehlen's Journal der 

 Physlk, 1809, p. 519, characterized the formation of the smallest orga- 

 nisms as a peculiar act of fermentation ; and enumerates, together with 

 the vinous and acetous fermentation, the infusorial fermentation which 

 forms organisms. In days of yore Autochthones might have been 

 thought to originate in this manner ; afterwards fermentation was left 

 for insects and weeds ; but since their manner of living and of re- 

 production has been better investigated, such an origin is no longer 

 found to be either necessary or admissible with regard to insects or the 

 larger plants. It was then thrown upon the fungi and infusoria, on 

 account of the great difficulty of observing them ; from which how- 

 ever, in accordance with what has been stated, it must now also be 

 rejected. 



M. Berzelius, who had to treat on the same subject in his Classical 

 Manual of Chemistrj^ but who does not offer any observations of his 

 own, adheres to the data given by other observers, that dead organic 

 matter when moistened with water creates infusoria ; and he finds no 

 improbability in Professor Hornschuch's idea that the prima germina 

 rerum, which he conceives to be the infusoria, might develop by various 

 external influences into other very different bodies. He has however 

 followed in the doctrine of organic atoms the representations of Dumas 

 and Milne Edwards ; and those organic atoms which by his doctrine 

 of chemical proportions have become so eminently useful and of such 

 extensive influence, are, in proportion to the imaginative capacity for 

 abstraction of various minds, unities more or less ideal, whose use in 

 theory seems destined for a long time to come to be of the most im- 

 portant value in the practical development of chemistry. (Animal 

 Cfiemistry (German translation by Wohler, p. 6), and Chemistry, vol. 

 iii. pp. 31 and 179.) 



Very recently the well known physicist M. Munke of Heidelberg 

 has himself made several observations with one of I'liisl's microscopes, 



