Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/591

Rh boiling up or "effervescence" of the fermenting liquid, and of Latin origin.

Our Teutonic cousins call the same process "gahren," "gasen," "goschen," and "gischen;" but, oddly enough, we do not seem to have retained their verb or substantive denoting the action itself, though we do use names identical with, or plainly derived from, theirs for the scum and lees. These are called, in Low German, "gascht" and "gischt;" in Anglo-Saxon, "gest," "gist," and "yst," whence our "yeast." Again, in Low German and in Anglo-Saxon, there is another name for yeast, having the form "barm," or "beorm;" and in the midland counties "barm" is the name by which yeast is still best known. In High German, there is a third name for yeast, "hefe," which is not represented in English, so far as I know.

All these words are said by philologers [sic] to be derived from roots expressive of the intestine motion of a fermenting substance. Thus "hefe" is derived from "heben," to raise; "barm" from "beren" or "baren," to bear up; "yeast," "yst," and "gist," have all to do with seething and foam, with "yeasty waves," and "gusty" breezes.

The same reference to the swelling up of the fermenting substance is seen in the Gallo-Latin terms "levure" and "leaven."

It is highly creditable to the ingenuity of our ancestors, that the peculiar property of fermented liquids, in virtue of which they "make glad the heart of man," seems to have been known in the remotest periods of which we have any record. All savages take to alcoholic fluids as if they were to the manner born. Our Vedic forefathers intoxicated themselves with the juice of the "soma;" Noah, by a not unnatural reaction against a superfluity of water, appears to have taken the earliest practicable opportunity of qualifying that which he was obliged to drink; and the ghosts of the ancient Egyptians were solaced by pictures of banquets in which the wine-cup passes around, graven on the walls of their tombs. A knowledge of the process of fermentation, therefore, was in all probability possessed by the prehistoric populations of the globe; and it must have become a matter of great interest even to primæval wine-bibbers to study the methods by which fermented liquids could be surely manufactured. No doubt, therefore, it was soon discovered that the most certain, as well as the most expeditious, way of making a sweet juice ferment was to add to it a little of the scum, or lees, of another fermenting juice. And it can hardly be questioned that this singular excitation of fermentation in one fluid, by a sort of infection, or inoculation, of a little ferment taken from some other fluid, together with the strange swelling, foaming, and hissing of the fermented substance, must have always attracted attention from the more thoughtful. Nevertheless, the commencement of the scientific analysis of the phenomena dates from a period not earlier than the first half of the seventeenth century.