314 STUDIES ON FERMENTATION. 



is alwaj's present, and the albuminous substance merely serves 

 by its occurrence to nourish, the germ and its successive 

 generations.'"' 



In our Memoir of 1862, on so-called spontaneous generations, 

 would it not have been an entire mistake to have attempted to 

 assign specific names to the microscopic organisms which we 

 met with in the course of our observations ? Not only would 

 we have met with extreme difficulty in the attempt, arising 

 from the state of extreme confusion which even in the present 

 day exists in the classification and nomenclature of these 

 microscopic organisms, but we should have been forced to 

 sacrifice clearness in our work besides ; at all events, we 

 should have wandered from our principal object, which was the 

 determination of the presence or absence of life in general, and 

 had nothing to do with the manifestation of a particular kind 

 of life in this or that species, animal or vegetable. Thus we 

 have systematical!}'' employed the vaguest nomenclature, such 

 as mucors, iorulce, bacteria, and vibrios. There was nothing arbi- 

 trary in our doing this, whereas there is much that is arbitrary 

 in adopting a definite system of nomenclature, and applying it 

 to organisms but imperfectly known, the differences or resem- 

 blances between which are only recognizable through certain 

 characteristics, the true signification of which is obscure. 

 Take, for example, the extensive array of widely different 

 systems that have been invented during the last few years for 

 the species of the genera bacterium and vibrio in the works 

 of Cohn, H. Hoffmann, Hallier, and Billroth. The confusion 

 which prevails here is very great, although we do not of course 

 by any means place these different works on the same footing 

 as regards their respective merits. 



M. Robin is, however, right in recognizing the impossibility 

 of maintaining in the present day, as he formerly did, " that fer- 

 mentation is an exterior phenomenon, going on outside crypto- 

 gamic cells, a phenomenon of contact. It is probably," he adds, 

 " an interior and molecular action at work in the inmost recesses 

 of the substance of each cell." From the day when we first 



