Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/247

Rh too freely supplied. Reverting to the development of the yeast-plant and the alcoholic fermentation, he found that they also went on best when free air was excluded. Thus, Liebig's dictum, that fermentation is the result of the action of oxygen, must be reversed or abandoned. The organisms working these processes were given the class-name of anærobes or beings that live without air. The French Academy's impressions of the results of Pasteur's work were spoken by Dumas, who said to him, "In the infinitely little of life you have discovered a third kingdom to which belong those beings which, with all the prerogatives of animal life, have no need of air to live, and find the heat they require in the chemical decompositions they provoke around them." The place of the organisms in the economy of Nature had not yet been fixed, but Pasteur was able to declare: "Whether the progress of science makes the vibrion a plant or an animal, is no matter; it is a living being endowed with motion, that lives without air and is ferment." It would be mere repetition to follow the experiments in putrefaction, where Liebig had denied that living organisms have any place, into which Pasteur carried the same methods and obtained the same results as in the case of fermentation. He proved that living organisms have all to do with it.

After M. Pasteur had been collecting his proofs for twenty years, Dr. Bouillaud sharply asked in the Academy: "How are your microscopic organisms disposed of? What are the ferments of the ferments?" He, as well as Liebig, believed the question could not be answered. Pasteur proved, by a series of the parallel experiments of the kind that have since become familiar, that oxygen deprived of its germs is incapable of producing fermentation or putrefaction, even after years, while the same substances are acted upon at once if the germs are present; and then answered that the ferments are destroyed by a new series of organisms—ærobes—living in the air, and these by other aerobes in succession, until the ultimate products are oxidized. "Thus, in the destruction of what has lived, all is reduced to the simultaneous action of the three great natural phenomena—fermentation, putrefaction, and slow combustion. A living being, animal or plant, or the débris of either, having just died, is exposed to the air. The life that has abandoned it is succeeded by life under other forms. In the superficial parts accessible to the air, the germs of the infinitely little ærobes flourish and multiply. The carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen of the organic matter are transformed, by the oxygen of the air and under the vital activity of the ærobes, into carbonic acid, the vapor of water, and ammonia. The combustion continues as long as organic matter and air are present together. At the same time the superficial combustion is going on, fermentation and putrefaction are performing their work, in the midst of the mass, by means of the developed germs of the anaerobes, which not only do not need oxygen to live, but which oxygen causes to perish. Gradually the phenomena