131 



discover in 1905 a fermentation process which had remained un- 

 noticed. In a paper published in that year Beijerinck described an 

 extremely interesting enrichment procedure which with almost un- 

 failing regularity brings to the fore a large sarcina-shaped micro- 

 organism causing a vigorous fermentation in sugar containing media, 

 such as beer wort i). The disco very of this quite unexpected fermen- 

 tation was the result of a series of systematic experiments made — 

 in part jointly with Dr. N. Goslings — to examine the question as 

 to which are the organisms able to develop in media of high acidity 

 under anaerobic conditions. In this investigation it was found that if 

 the development of moulds and yeasts was suppressed by complete 

 exclusion of air, the addition of somewhat higher amounts of inorganic 

 acids to beer wort inoculated with garden soil almost invariably led 

 to a fermentation which was marked by the development of large 

 sarcina packets. 



It happened that Suringar, professor of botany at the University 

 of Leiden, who had been Beijerinck's teacher in his student period, 

 had published in 1 865 a monograph on the remarkable sarcina noted 

 by GooDSiR, a Scottish physician, as long ago as 1842. 



GooDSiR had observed the occurrence of regularly formed packets 

 in the stomach contents of a patiënt, and had described these forma- 

 tions under the name of Sarcina' ventriculi. This observation was 

 repeated f rom time to time by medical investigators, who encountered 

 the organism especially in cases of stenosis oesophagi. It was soon 

 suspected that a close connection might exist between the presence of 

 the sarcinae and a gas development sometimes occurring in the 

 stomach. However, no proof for the correctness of this assumption 

 could be furnished, since it appeared impossible to cultivate the or- 

 ganism in vitro. Suringar was the first to prove the vegetable nature 

 of the organism, and, f rom his time on, it has been ranked with the 

 bacteria. 



There is no doubt that Beijerinck was thoroughly acquainted 

 with the organism to which his former teacher had once devoted so 

 much of his attention. It is, therefore, not surprising that Beijerinck 

 should have taken into consideration in his first paper, the possible 

 identity of his new fermentation organism and Goodsir's Sarcina 

 ventriculi. It should, however, be realized how daring a thought this 

 was. On the one hand an organism which appeared, on the evidence of 

 enrichment cultures to be practically ubiquitous in nature, on the 

 other hand a medical "living curiosity" which nobody had ever seen 

 develop outside the human body. 



Beijerinck's studies of his new fermentation organism had made 

 him familiar with one especially remarkable property, viz., that the 

 cultures could only be transferred into fresh media as long as the 

 fermentation was still active. Obviously the bacterium dies off very 



1) Proc. Kon. Akad. v. Wet. Amsterdam 7, 580, 1906. 



