from an Agricultural and Veterinary Point of View. 59 
'being preyed upon by others ; so that the ferments are fer- 
mented by other ferments. 
" In the destruction of that which has lived," says M. Valery 
Radot, in his * Life of Pasteur,' " all reduces itself to the simul- 
taneous action of these three great natural phenomena — fer- 
mentation, putrefaction, and slow combustion. A living 
organism dies — animal or plant, or the remains of one or the 
other. It is exposed to the contact of the air. To the life 
which has quitted it, succeeds life under other forms. In the 
superficial parts, which the air can reach, the germs of the 
infinitely small a?robies hatch and multiply themselves. The 
carbon, the hydrogen, and the nitrogen of the organic matters 
are transformed by the oxygen of the air, and under the influ- 
ence of the life of these aerobics, into carbonic acid, vapour of 
water, and ammonia-gas. As long as organic matter and air 
are present, these combustions will continue. While these 
superficial combustions are going on, fermentation and putre- 
faction are doing their work in the interior of the mass, by the 
developed germs of the anaerobies, which not only do not 
require oxygen for their life, but which oxygen actually kills. 
Little by little, at length, by this work of fermentation and 
slow combustion, the phenomenon is accomplished. Whether 
in the free atmosphere, or under the earth, which is always more 
or less impregnated with air — all animal and vegetable matters 
end by disappearing. To arrest these phenomena, an extremely 
low temperature is required. It is thus that, in the ice of the 
Polar regions, antediluvian elephants have been found perfectly 
intact. The microscopic organisms could not live in so cold a 
temperature. These facts still further strengthen all the new 
ideas as to the important part performed by these infinitely 
small organisms, which are, in fact, the masters of the world. 
If we could suppress their work, which is always going on, the 
surface of the globe, encumbered with organic matters, would 
soon become uninhabitable." 
In the results of his researches into the acetic fermentation, 
Pasteur has not only again shown the uncertainty of mere obser- 
vation as compared with the reliability of experimentation, es- 
pecially when such a master institutes decisive experiments that 
are in conformity with and explain facts, but he has conferred a 
great benefit upon industries closely allied with agriculture, and 
has more or less directly benefited agriculture itself. And in 
these researches he has once more upset the theories of such 
chemists as Berzelius, Mitscherlich, Liebig, and others, and 
placed our knowledge of an important industrial process — the 
production of acetic acid — on a safe and solid basis, by proving 
that this depends upon the fixation of atmospheric oxygen by 
-a micro-organism. 
