Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/100

88 gas, from all contact with air. The butyric ferment not only lives without air, hut Pasteur showed that air is fatal to it. He finally divided microscopic organisms into two great classes, which he named respectively ærobies and anærobies, the former requiring free oxygen to maintain life, the latter capable of living without free oxygen, but able to wrest this element from its combinations with other elements. This destruction of pre-existing compounds and formation of new ones, caused by the increase and multiplication of the organism, constitute the process of fermentation.

Under this head are also rightly ranked the phenomena of putrefaction. As M. Radot well expresses it, the fermentation of sugar may be described as the putrefaction of sugar. In this particular field M. Pasteur, whose contributions to the subject are of the highest value, was preceded by Schwann, a man of great merit, of whom the world has heard too little. Schwann placed decoctions of meat in flasks, sterilized the decoctions by boiling, and then supplied them with calcined air, the power of which to support life he showed to be unimpaired. Under these circumstances putrefaction never set in. Hence the conclusion of Schwann, that putrefaction was not due to the contact of air, as affirmed by Gay-Lussac, but to something suspended in the air which heat was able to destroy. This something consists of living organisms which nourish themselves at the expense of the organic substance, and cause its putrefaction.

The grasp of Pasteur on this class of subjects was embracing. He studied acetic fermentation, and found it to be the work of a minute fungus, the mycoderma aceti, which, requiring free oxygen for its nutrition, overspreads the surface of the fermenting liquid. By the alcoholic ferment the sugar of the grape-juice is transformed into carbonic-acid gas and alcohol, the former exhaling, the latter remaining in the wine. By the mycoderma aceti, the wine is, in its turn, converted into vinegar. Of the experiments made in connection with this subject one deserves especial mention. It is that in which Pasteur suppressed all albuminous matters, and carried on the fermentation with purely crystallizable substances. He studied the deterioration of vinegar, revealed its cause, and the means of preventing it. He defined the part played by the little eel-like organisms which sometimes swarm in vinegar-casks, and ended by introducing important ameliorations and improvements in the manufacture of vinegar. The discussion with Liebig and other minor discussions of a similar nature, which M. Radot has somewhat strongly emphasized, I will not here dwell upon.

It was impossible for an inquirer like Pasteur to evade the question, Whence come these minute organisms which are demonstrably capable of producing effects on which vast industries are built and on which whole populations depend for occupation and sustenance? He thus found himself face to face with the question of spontaneous