794 Transactions of the American Institute. 



altogether ; and, from the end of the last century until now, it lias, 

 I believe, been used exclusively as the denotation of spirits of wine, 

 and bodies chemically allied to that substance. 



The process which gives rise to alcohol in a saccharine fluid is 

 known to us as " fermentation," a term based upon the apparent boil- 

 ing up or " effervescence " of the fermenting liquid, and of Latin 

 origin. 



Our Teutonic cousins call the same process " gahren," or " gasen," 

 "goschen," and " gischen ;" but, oddly enough, we do not seem to 

 have retained their verb or substantive denoting the action itself, 

 though we do use names identical with, or plainly derived from, theirs 

 for the scum and lees. These are called, in Low German, " gascht " 

 and "gischt;" in Anglo-Saxon, "gest," "gist" and "yst," whence 

 our " yeast." Again, in Low German and in Anglo-Saxon, there is 

 another name for yeast, having the form " barm," or " beorm ; " and 

 in the midland counties " barm " is the name by which yeast is still 

 best known. In High German there is a third name for yeast, " hefe," 

 which is not represented in English, so far as I know. 



All these words are said by philologers to be derived from roots 

 expressive of the intestine motion of a fermenting substance. Thus 

 " hefe " is derived from "heben 4 " to raise ; "barm" from "beren" 

 or " baren," to bear up ; " yeast," " yst " and " gist," have all to do 

 with seething and foam, with "yeasty waves," and "gusty" breezes. 



The same reference to the swelling up of the fermenting substance 

 is seen in the Gallo-Latin terms "levure" and "leaven." 



It is highly creditable to the ingenuity of our ancestors, that the 

 peculiar property of fermented liquids, in virtue of which they 

 " make glad the heart of man,' ' seems to have been known in the 

 remotest periods of which we have any record. All savages take to 

 alcoholic fluids as if they were to the manor born. Our Yedic 

 forefathers intoxicated themselves with the juice of the "soma;" 

 Noah, by a not unnatural reaction against a superfluity of water, 

 appears to have taken the earliest practicable opportunity of qualify- 

 ing that which he was obliged to drink ; and the ghosts of the 

 ancient Egyptians were solaced by pictures of banquets in which the 

 wine-cup passes round, graven on the walls of their tombs. A know- 

 ledge of the process of fermentation, therefore, was in all probability 

 possessed by the prehistoric populations of the globe ; and it must 

 have become a matter of great interest, even to primaeval wine-bib- 

 bers, to study the methods by which fermented liquids could be surely 

 manufactured. No doubt, therefore, it was soon discovered that the 



