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CHAPTER II. 
By Dr. OSCAR LOEW. 
With some Comparative Notes on the 
Fermentation of Tea and Coffee. 
AttHouGH much has been written about 
the fermentation of cacao, there stills exists a 
great difference of opinion in regard to the 
process, its purpose and necessity, and the 
kind, of action involved in it. 
Herbert Wright, in his exhaustive work on 
cacao,’ mentions yeast cells’? as the most impor- 
tant organisms causing the fermentation, while 
other authors attribute it to unorganized fer- 
ments, others again to bacteria, and even the 
changes due to germination were supposed to 
play a réle in it. 
According to Sir George Watt, in his Dic- 
tionary of the Economic Products of India? :— 
1 « Theobroma Cacao or Cocoa.” Colombo, 1907, 
p- 108. 
2 According to Dr. Axel Preyer (Tvopenpflanzer, 5 
(1901), pp: 157-173), a special kind of yeast, which he 
named Saccharomyces theobvome, effects the best fermen- 
tation in Ceylon. See Dr. Preyer’s essay, p. 20 and 
elsewhere, also Dr. Nicholls’s, p. 225, et seg. 
8 London, 1893, vol. vi, pt. 4, p. 44. 
