divided and others a good deal broader, and all 
have a singular and agreeable effect during win- 
ter; and its flowers have a herbaceous colour, 
and grow in roundish heads, and have very little 
beauty, and bloom from June till August. This 
plant is readily propagated from cuttings, planted 
in a shady place at any time from May till the 
early part of autumn. 
WORT. The infusion of malt which is fer- 
mented into beer or ale. Ground malt is mixed 
with somewhat more than its own bulk of water, 
at a temperature of between 160° and 180° Fah- 
renheit, in a cylindrical vessel called a mash-tun ; 
the mixture is covered from the air, and allowed 
to stand during two or three hours; the liquid 
portion of it is then drawn off by a cock at the 
bottom of the vessel; and successive infusions 
of the same kind, and in the same way, are made 
upon the residuum till all its extractive princi- 
ples are sufficiently withdrawn. The liquid thus 
obtained is wort; and, as appears from the na- 
ture of the process, it is simply a watery solution 
of the extractive or saccharine and amylaceous 
matters of the malt. It has a brownish-yellow 
colour, a peculiar smell, and a lusciously sweet 
taste; and, if it have been properly made, is per- 
fectly transparent. The chief ingredient in it, 
or rather its essential constituent, is a sugary 
substance which, when separated from the other 
ingredients and dried at a temperature of 160° 
Fahrenheit, forms a brittle mass with a glazed 
surface, and has a light brown colour and a spe- 
cific gravity of 1552. Another ingredient is 
starch,—which may readily be precipitated by 
dropping some infusion of nut-galls into the 
liquid ; another is mucilage,—which may be pre- 
cipitated by means of alcohol; a fourth is gluten, 
—which passes during the subsequent process of 
fermentation into yeast; and a fifth in many spe- 
cimens of wort—though it ought not to exist in 
any—is a mixture of insoluble matter drawn off 
from the sediment in the mash-tun, and render- 
ing the liquid more or less slightly turbid. The 
proportion of starch approaches to little or no- 
thing in the degree in which the grain was tho- 
roughly malted ; and the proportion of mucilage 
is always greater in the last infusions of any 
preparation of wort than in the first. 
The ordinary process for converting wort into 
ale or beer is described in the article Brewina, 
and the chemical changes involved in it are de- 
scribed in the article Fermentation; but a re- 
markable variety of the process practised in 
Bavaria, together with consequent modifications 
on the chemical changes and results, may be 
profitably studied in the following passage from 
Liebig: —“ English, French, and most of the 
German beers, are converted into vinegar when 
exposed to the action of air. But this property 
is not possessed by Bavarian beer, which may be 
kept in vessels only half-filled without acidifying 
or experiencing any change. This valuable qua- 
lity is obtained for it by a peculiar management 
WORT. Cia 773 
of the fermentation of the wort. The perfection 
of experimental knowledge has here led to the 
solution of one of the most beautiful problems of 
the theory of fermentation. Wort is proportion- 
ally richer in gluten than in sugar, so that dur- 
ing its fermentation in the common way, a great 
quantity of yeast is formed as a thick scum. 
The carbonic acid evolved during the process 
attaches itself to the particles of the yeast, by 
which they become specifically lighter than the 
liquid in which they are formed, and rise to its 
surface. Gluten in the act of oxidation comes 
in contact with the particles of the decomposing 
sugar in the interior of the liquid. The carbonic 
acid from the sugar and insoluble ferment from 
the gluten are disengaged simultaneously, and 
cohere together. A great quantity of gluten re- 
mains dissolved in the fermented liquid, even 
after the transformation of the sugar is com- 
pleted, and this gluten causes the conversion of 
the alcohol into acetic acid, on account of its 
strong disposition to attract oxygen, and to un- 
dergo decay. Now, it is plain, that with its 
separation, and that of all substances capable of 
attracting oxygen, the beer would lose the pro- 
perty of becoming acid. This end is completely 
attained in the process of fermentation adopted 
in Bavaria. The wort, after having been treated 
with hops in the usual manner, is thrown into 
very wide flat vessels, in which a large surface 
of the liquid is exposed to the air. The fermen- 
tation is then allowed to proceed, while the tem- 
perature of the chambers in which the vessels are 
placed is never allowed to rise above from 45° to 
50’ F. The fermentation lasts from three to six 
weeks, and the carbonic acid evolved during its 
continuance is not in large bubbles which burst 
upon the surface of the liquid, but in small bub- | 
bles like those which escape from an acidulous 
mineral water, or from a liquid saturated by high 
pressure. The surface of the wort is scarcely 
covered with a scum, and all the yeast is depo- 
sited on the bottom of the vessel, in the form of 
a viscous sediment. In order to obtain a clear 
conception of the great difference between the 
two kinds of fermentation, it may perhaps be 
sufficient to recall to mind the fact, that the 
transformation of gluten or of other azotised 
matters is a process consisting of several stages. 
The first stage is the conversion of the gluten 
into insoluble ferment in the interior of the 
liquid, and as the transformation of the sugar 
goes on at the same time, carbonic acid and yeast 
are simultaneously disengaged. It is known with 
certainty, that this formation of yeast depends 
upon oxygen being appropriated by the gluten in 
the act of decomposition; but it has not been 
sufficiently shown, whether this oxygen is derived 
from the water, from the sugar, or from the glu- 
ten itself; whether it combines directly with the 
gluten, or merely with its hydrogen, so as to 
form water. For the purpose of obtaining a defi- 
nite idea of the process, we may designate the 
