Rt 
EHRENBERG ON ORGANIC MOLECULES AND ATOMS. 571 
organic nature” (p. 352). “ Globules of milk and blood are Zymom ; 
gelatine, caseum, starch, sugar, &c., contain Zymom” (p. 350). 
“ Silica first takes a vegetable formation, and from the Zymom formed 
by this process originates further animal life” (p. 358). “ Vegetable © 
substance can be immediately changed into an infusorium” (p. 360). 
“ From Zymom may be produced, when favourable conditions concur, 
infusoria of this or that form” (p. 358). “ The first infusorium, the 
lowest animal creature, is a living Zymom globule” (p. 358). “Zymom 
is in a certain relation an egg” (p. 360). ‘“ The yolk of an egg con- 
sists merely of Zymom combined with slime” (p. 357). “This is no 
hypothesis but a fact” (p. 361)! 
That the commencement of many organisms is an action of putre- 
faction or of fermentation, and therefore a chemical process, is a very 
ancient opinion, and could not fail to be revived in a refined form.. 
M. Gruithuisen has in the eighth volume of Gehlen’s Journal der 
Physik, 1809, p. 519, characterized the formation of the smallest orga- 
nisms as a peculiar act of fermentation; and enumerates, together with 
the vinous and acetous fermentation, the infusorial fermentation which 
forms organisms. In days of yore Autochthones might have been 
thought to originate in this manner ; afterwards fermentation was left 
for insects and weeds; but since their manner of living and of re- 
production has been better investigated, such an origin is no longer 
found to be either necessary or admissible with regard to insects or the 
larger plants. It was then thrown upon the fungi and infusoria, on 
account of the great difficulty of observing them ; from which how- 
ever, in accordance with what has been stated, it must now also be 
rejected. 
M. Berzelius, who had to treat on the same subject in his Classical 
Manual of Chemistry, but who does not offer any observations of his 
own, adheres to the data given by other observers, that dead organic 
matter when moistened with water creates infusoria; and he finds no 
improbability in Professor Hornschuch’s idea that the prima germina 
rerum, which he conceivesto be the infusoria, might develop by various 
external influences into other very different bodies. He has however 
followed in the doctrine of organic atoms the representations of Dumas 
and Milne Edwards ; and those organic atoms which by his doctrine 
of chemical proportions have become so eminently useful and of such 
extensive influence, are, in proportion to the imaginative capacity for 
_ abstraction of various minds, unities more or less ideal, whose use in 
_ theory seems destined for a long time to come to be of the most im- 
portant value in the practical development of chemistry. (Animal 
% Chemistry (German translation by Wohler, p. 6), and Chemistry, vol. 
_ iii. pp. 31 and 179.) 
Very recently the well known physicist M. Munke of Heidelberg 
has himself made several observations with one of Plés!’s microscopes, 
