APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 69 



savages take to alcoholic fluids as if they were to 

 the manner born. Our Vedic forefathers intoxicated 

 themselves with the juice of the "soma"; Noah, 

 by a not unnatural reaction against a superfluity of 

 water, appears to have taken the earliest practicable 

 opportunity of qualifying that which he was obliged 

 to drink ; and the ghosts of the ancient Egyptians 

 were solaced by pictures of banquets in which the 

 wine-cup passes round, graven on the walls of their 

 tombs. A knowledge of the process of fermentation, 

 therefore, was in all probability possessed by the 

 prehistoric populations of the globe ; and it must 

 have become a matter of great interest even to 

 primaeval wine-bibbers to study the methods by 

 which fermented liquids could be surely manufactured. 

 No doubt it was soon discovered that the most 

 certain, as well as the most expeditious, way of 

 making a sweet juice ferment was to add to it a 

 little of the scum, or lees, of another fermenting 

 juice. And it can hardly be questioned that this 

 singular excitation of fermentation in one fluid, by a 

 sort of infection, or inoculation, of a little ferment 

 taken from some other fluid, together with the 

 strange swelling, foaming, and hissing of the 

 fermented substance, must have always attracted 

 attention from the more thoughtful. Nevertheless, 

 the commencement of the scientific analysis of the 

 phenomena dates from a period not earlier than the 

 first half of the seventeenth century. 



At this time, Van Helmont made a first step, by 

 pointing out that the peculiar hissing and bubbling 

 of a fermented liquid is due, not to the evolution of 

 common air (which he, as the inventor of the term 

 "gas," calls "gas ventosum"), but to that of a 

 peculiar kind of air such as is occasionally met with 

 in caves, mines, and wells, and which he calls " gas 

 sylvestre." 



But a century elapsed before the nature of this 

 " gas sylvestre," or, as it was afterwards called, 

 "fixed air," was clearly determined, and it was 



