Insects and Diseases. 
DERANGEMENT OF THE ENZYMES OF PLANTS. 
By E. S. Hubbard. 
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : 
When blood coagulates, a self generat¬ 
ed ferment separates it into two parts: 
First, a clot called fibrin caused mainly 
by the breaking down or sticking together 
of the coruscles with fibrinogenagers or 
para globulin, corpuscle products, and 
second, a watery portion called serum 
which contains the tissue nutrients elab¬ 
orated by the red corpuscles, the alexins 
or anti-toxins of the white corpuscles, 
and if venous blood, also the waste pro¬ 
ducts of the tissues that have been neu¬ 
tralized by the white corpuscles and are 
finally split up and excreted as tauric and 
uric acids from the liver and kidneys and 
carbonic acid gases from the lungs. 
This simple looking, natural reaction 
is a type o<f the composition of the vital 
fluids of all organic cellular life, the se¬ 
rum of blood corresponding to the enzy¬ 
mes of plants. Now fellow members, I 
approach the subject of this short paper 
with great diffidence. 
The question of nutrition is vast and 
specialized, with much conflicting evi¬ 
dence caused by the rapid advance of ex¬ 
perimental knowledge and the various 
conclusions drawn by different observers 
from similar experiments. I have only a 
superficial and incomplete unprofessional 
acquaintance with this work. Many con¬ 
clusions must be drawn from the analogy 
of animal and bacterial research and the 
subject, now in its infancy, bears about 
the same relation to plant feeding with 
fertilizers that the empirical practice of 
materia medica did to diseases before the 
establishing of the germ theory. 
However, as many members have doubt¬ 
less given little attention to the ques¬ 
tion, I trust the elementary generaliza¬ 
tions I present will be of interest to the 
Society. 
Pasteur, the noted French chemist, es¬ 
tablished his reputation and blazed the 
way for further similar work by investi¬ 
gating yeasts for the German brewers. 
The brewers had been troubled with bad 
tasting, bitter beer, poorly fermented beer 
and yeast that would not give uniform re¬ 
sults. So they finally called in the chem¬ 
ist with his culture tubes and microscope. 
Pasteur practically had to begin at the 
beginning. First, he had to find out why 
sprouted 1 malt would ferment and un¬ 
sprouted barley would not. These studies 
showed that in sprouting the life germs of 
the barley generated and excreted a ni¬ 
trogenous fluid, a ferment or enzyme that 
is called diastase. He next found this en- 
