124 



STXTDIES ON FERMENTATION. 



Such are the purely hypothetical and exploded ideas which 

 MM. Freray, Trecul, Bechamp, H. Hoffmann, Hallier, and 

 others would revive in our own day, in opposition to a theory so 

 clear and so well supported by facts as that of germs floating in 

 the air, or spread over the surface of objects, as fruits, dry or 

 green wood, and so on. 



M. Bechamp believes that he has discovered that another of 

 vinegar, introduced into various saccharine liquids, in the pre- 

 sence of carbonate of lime, generates bacteria, which, with the 

 sugar or dregs, produce butyric, lactic, and acetic acids, and that 

 this same mother of vinegar, without the addition of the carbon- 

 ate of lime, " generates, on the other hand, the fine cells, which 

 produce the normal alcoholic fermentation of cane sugar." 

 Further, M. Bechamp advances the hypothesis that mother of 

 vinegar is a conglomeration of microzymata, and, as he fails to 

 see in the experiments on which he bases the conclusions which 

 we have just given, that bacteria and ferment cells are the 

 result of spontaneous impregnation, having no connection with 

 the presence of mother of vinegar, on which he experimented, 

 he arrives at this conclusion : "In the experiments which I 

 have just described, things happened as though the microzyma, 

 under some peculiarly favourable conditions, had been the 

 parent both of the bacteria and the cells." * . . . . 



The object of the following experiments was the study of 

 these assumed transformations of the mycoderma aceti in sac- 

 charine liquids, in the presence and in the absence of carbonate 

 of lime. 



We prepared some two-necked flasks, containing as a growing 

 medium a liquid composed of one- third of Orleans vinegar, and 

 two-thirds of a white wine used by vinegar-makers in Orleans. 

 This liquid is peculiarly adapted to the development of ?>iycoc?erw(7 

 aceti. 



On December 13th, 1872, we sowed the little plant in a state 



* 3360HAMP, Recherches sur la Nature et VOrigine des Ferments [Annales 

 de Chimie et de Physique, 4" serie, t. xxiii., and Oomptes rendus de 

 VAcademie des Sciences, Oct. 23, 1871). 



