Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/734

714 using free oxygen gas, produces at once phenomena of fermentation."

I have not yet made the experiments, but every thing leads me to believe that animal cells should act like vegetable ones. Death cannot suppress instantly the reaction of the solids and liquids in the organism. I am convinced, but it is as yet only a preconceived idea, that on asphyxiating an animal suddenly there should appear here and there, and perhaps in all parts of his body, acts of fermentation whose slight duration or intensity have prevented their detection hitherto. Perhaps I may soon bring before this Academy the result of an experiment which would consist in tying firmly the limb of an animal so as to stop the circulation in it, and then plunging it into an atmosphere of carbonic-acid gas. What will take place in this limb thus stricken with death? A sort of physical and chemical life, if I may so speak, will continue and will probably manifest itself by phenomena of gangrene which I have long considered as having but distant connections with putrefaction, and which, in my opinion, might be classed with the phenomena offered by a fruit detached from the tree which bore it.

I shall now answer M. Bouillaud's question, In other words, "How can the ferments which are living beings, and which contain materials of the same order as those of all living beings, decompose after the decompositions which they have themselves provoked? How can they be destroyed and disappear, or at least be reduced to the germs alone, which are eternal, so much at least as life may be eternal on the surface of the earth? How can the materials which compose them become gaseous and return to the atmosphere in the more or less mineral forms of vapor, carbonic-acid gas, hydrogen, nitrogen, ammonia, etc.?"

Although in the transformations to which I allude, and which will now occupy us, Nature obeys a very small number of perfectly-determined general laws, the phenomena present an infinite variety in the details, and if I wished to include all the forms of the return to the air or soil of organic matter after death, it would require time and space which are not at my disposal; but as amid the thousand variations of the phenomena a very small number of laws preside over their manifestation, as these laws are found in all the individual cases, I cannot answer the question of our illustrious associate better than by taking a definite example, following it through all its phases, and then adding, "ab uno disce omnes."

I shall take the return to the atmosphere, and to the soil, of one of the most precious fruits of the earth, the grape, and, far from restricting the difficulty, I shall take it in its greatest complexity. It is unnecessary to say that instead of the grape I might have taken any other woody or leafy organ, either of the vine or of any other plant,