FERMENTS, FERMENTATIONS, AND LIFE. 
Untit very lately, all fermentations were supposed to 
be produced by the spontaneous decomposition of organic 
matter within a fermentable liquid. It was said that on 
contact with air this organic matter undergoes a special 
change which gives it the character of leaven, and this was 
regarded as an agent having the power of spreading decom- 
posing movement. It is true, brewer’s yeast had long been 
well known; the facts of its cellular composition and its 
organization were familiar; but no relation was recognized 
between this organized condition and those phenomena of 
fermentation produced by yeast in saccharine liquids, such 
as grape-juice or the wort of ale. In the first few years of 
this century Turpin, and afterward Cagniard-Latour, at- 
tempted in vain to prove that such a relation existed; it 
was always denied that any thing else could be observed 
in alcoholic fermentation than an operation resembling all 
those slow decompositions that were classed among fer- 
mentations. We have admitted, in our time, that alcoholic 
fermentation, instead of being an exception, is on the con- 
trary the very type of the phenomena we are treating of ; 
that the yeast-cells, far from being unimportant, take an 
essential part in it, and that in all fermentations whatever 
there occur low organizations, microscopic corpuscles, more. 
or less analogous to those of yeast. At least this is the 
first result of investigations carried on in the past fifteen 
