120 PASTEUR 



but small attention to species, regarding it as waste of 

 time, as it undoubtedly often is, to trouble about names 

 and synonyms. 



As Professor Jorgenson and Dr. J. R. Green have 

 shown in two recently-published works, we have 

 learnt much about brewing during the last five-and- 

 twenty years. The nucleus of the yeast-cell has 

 been made visible by appropriate staining; some 

 thirty different species of yeast-cell have been de- 

 scribed, and their properties as ferments have been 

 investigated ; Buchner, by grinding up the yeast- 

 cells, has produced an extract, called zymase, capable 

 of converting sugar into alcohol ; the fact has been 

 established that it is not so much bacteria as other 

 fungi, allied and often congeneric with the yeast-cell, 

 which produce disease in beer; still, allowing a full 

 measure of credit to later workers, we may look back 

 to Pasteur's researches in the early seventies as estab- 

 lishing for the first time a scientific basis for brewing. 



The same remarks are applicable to Pasteur's work 

 on the diseases due to specific organisms in the region 

 of preventive medicine. We have built and are build- 

 ing a lordly edifice, but he drew the plan and even 

 laid the foundations. More than two centuries ago 

 Robert Boyle * the Father of Chemistry and Brother 

 of the Earl of Cork ' had said that he who could solve 

 the nature of fermentations would be without doubt 

 more capable than others of explaining certain pheno- 

 mena of disease. Towards the end of his ' Etudes sur 

 la Biere,' Pasteur wrote : * The aetiology of contagious 

 diseases is on the eve of having unexpected light shed 

 upon it.' He was already thinking of his investigations 

 into the cause and prevention of contagious disease. 



There is a certain malady known, when it attacks 

 cattle and sheep, as ' charbon ' or * sang de rate,' and 

 when it attacks man, as * woolsorter's disease.' The 

 term ' anthrax ' covers the disease in both beast and 



