YEAST CELL AND ITS LESSONS 179 



of yeast, and the complicated bi- and tri-saccharoses are, 

 for the most part, resolved into simpler molecular construc- 

 tions before suffering the usual decomposition. 



There is a fertile field of inquiry open to investigation 

 as to whether some of the curious by-blows of fermentive 

 action may not lead to further discrimination between con- 

 structive and destructive fermentation. We have certainly 

 arrived at a point, in so far as these studies are concerned, 

 which bids us be cheery as to the future, for the modern 

 man of science has far outstripped those learned forbears 

 of his who, to use Sir Edward Elgar's lugubrious simile, 

 were like " blind men in a churchyard at midnight, trying 

 to read epitaphs in a forgotten tongue." Emil Fischer's 

 work alone has inspired that able chemist, Dr. M. 0. 

 Forster, in saying, "It is permissible to prophesy that his 

 contemporary researches among purine derivatives and 

 synthetical polypeptides will culminate in dramatic results, 

 as they have the character of a reconnaissance preceding 

 an attack on the proteids, which chemists anticipate will 

 share the fate of the two other principal food materials- 

 fats and sugars." Dr. Gustav Mann, of Oxford, in his 

 erudite work on the Chemistry of the Albuminoids (a work 

 based on Cohnheim's treatise, but which forms a much 

 expanded version of the original) strikes the student on its 

 perusal as predicting the early synthesis of an enzyme. 

 Indeed, the advances chronicled therein are potential to a 

 singular degree ; but it is not yet time for the full fruits of 

 those hundred-fold labors, directed primarily to the eluci- 

 dation of yeast and fermentation, to fall to the husband- 

 man's sickle. 



It has only been possible for me to touch upon one or two 

 of the manifold thoughts which suggest themselves when 

 one watches the activity of yeast. I might have mentioned 

 the interest which was aroused by the publication of Dr. 

 de Backer's volume, Les Ferments Therapeutiques, in 1896; 

 wherein it is noted in how anxious a manner the yeast 

 cell will swallow up certain bacteria, pathogenic and other- 



