CONDITIONS FAVOURING FEBMENTATION. 



87 



initiating some or the whole of the series of changes by which they 

 were themselves produced, in other suitable sites. 



The essential difference between the two problems thus becomes 

 plain. The only point which my experiment leaves in the least 

 doubtful in regard to the causal conditions initiating fermenta- 

 tion is, whether any latent, powerless, and, as it were, dead organ- 

 ized ferment may still, in spite of the usual evidence to the con- 

 trary, lurk in the seemingly " sterilized " fluid. This, however, 

 is the very point about which there is no shadow of doubt in 

 regard to zymosis. Possible ferments without number are, by 

 necessity, present in the form of tissue-elements. So that if we 

 are to be guided by the analogy upon which all germ-theorists so 

 strongly rely, the independent generation of a zymotic process 

 should, for the reason above specified, be incomparably more easy 

 to be brought about than fermentation in a germless fluid. 

 In regard to the independent origin of a zymosis, the all-important 

 point is, not whether latent ferments exist, but whether any 

 causes, or sets of unhygienic conditions, can rouse or modify, in 

 certain special modes, the activity of any of these myriads of poten- 

 tial ferments of which the human organism is so largely composed. 

 And if, as some germ-theorists would have us believe, impotent 

 germs of common ferment-organisms, incapable of exclusion, are 

 also widely disseminated throughout the body, these, if they are 

 such unavoidable elements, could (in regard to the aetiology of 

 disease) only be looked upon as components of the body, ranking 

 side by side with the tissue-elements themselves. 



Thus such organized ferments or germs as are possibly absent 

 from the "sterilized" experimental fluids are confessedly present by 

 myriads in persons who may be sickening under the influence of 

 various unhygienic conditions or non-specific states of the system ; 

 and the only point which is regarded as doubtful in connexion 

 with the de novo origin of a zymosis is what analogy might lead us to 

 affirm as completely proved by my experiments, viz., that certain 

 conditions, or states of system,^ may be capable of rousing some 



may partially see, as a consequence of this theory, that every being, every organ, 

 every cell which lives or continues its life without making use of atmospheric 

 air, or which uses it in a manner insufficient for the whole of the phenomena of 

 its own nutrition, must possess the characteristics of a ferment with regard to 

 the substance which is the source of its total or complementary heat." — Compt, 

 Rend. 1872, t. Ixxv. p. 784. 



