NEWEST IDEAS AS TO WHAT IS LIFE 



and far. He, and they, had revealed the preva- 

 lence of these invisible fungus-like growths through- 

 out the whole of nature, had traced the good and 

 evil effects of their presence in the human body, in 

 the air we breathe, in the water we drink, the food 

 we eat, and had shown that some of these are the 

 cause of disease. 



Yet Pasteur, on the crucial point, was utterly 

 wrong. A single experiment served to overthrow 

 the ideas towards which he had devoted a good 

 portion of his life-work. Like many another, his 

 mind seemed to rebel against mechanical or phys- 

 ical explanations of such . phenomena as those of 

 life. It was he who had revealed the intimate rela- 

 tions of life and fermentation; chemist though he 

 was, he yet shrank from a chemical explanation of 

 both. 



For Pasteur, fermentation was always and ever 

 a vital action, a product of the activity of living 

 things. Chemical that product might be, but the 

 process, never. A German savant, Buchner, came 

 to the problem without this prejudice. He took a 

 culture of these same yeast-cells with which Pas- 

 teur had done so much, mixed them with a very 

 fine, very hard quartz sand, then put the whole 

 under enormous pressure. Of course the sand 

 crushed the yeast-cells to pulp. From this pulp 

 flowed a sap, or liquor, which, carefully strained, 



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