STUDIES ON FKKMENTATION. 153 



a spirit lamp, and the grapes were cut off with a pair of fine 

 scissors, which had also been passed through the flame. By- 

 means of a badger-hair brush, thoroughly purified in water, each 

 grape to which a portion of its peduncle remained attached, was 

 washed in a little pure water. The successive washing of a 

 dozen grapes in 3 c.c, of water was sufficient to make the water 

 turbid ; we then examined it under the microscope. Each 

 field contained many little organized bodies, accidentally 

 associated, now and again, with some very scarce crystalline 

 spicules. As a rule, the organisms consisted of simple, trans- 

 parent, colourless cells ; some, indeed, of larger size had a 

 yellowish brown colour, and were detached or united in 

 irregular masses ; and, lastly, there were club-shaped or bottle- 

 shaped vessels, full of spores ready to germinate. We repeated 

 this experiment with bunches of other varieties of grape, and 

 also submitted to examination water in which the outer sur- 

 faces of gooseberries, plums, and pears had been washed ; the 

 result was in each case the same, that is, we found a great 

 number of the same colourless cells, and the same irregular 

 masses of darker cells, which latter, however, we must not con- 

 found with the masses of dead cells sometimes found covering: 

 parts of the epidermis of certain fruits. 



As we had purposely left each fruit attached to part of its 

 peduncle, we wished to ascertain if these corpuscles proceeded 

 from the grapes or from the wood of the peduncle. For this 

 purpose we washed separately the surface of the grapes and the 

 woody part of the bunch. The water in which the latter was 

 washed was visibly more charged with the minute organisms 

 than that in which the grapes was washed, although the latter 

 was by no means free from them. 



Plate VIII. represents these corpuscles as they exist on the 

 surface of fruits, magnified 500 times. The groups, b, h, h, 

 ... , c, c, ... are of a brown colour, more or less dark, 

 or of a reddish yellow ; the cells a, a, ... are transparent. 

 Amongst them are some spores of ordinary fungoid growths, 

 and several cells which are probably the issue of a germination 



