the saccharine juices round them?
This is a question of extreme theoretic significance. It was first
answered affirmatively by the able and conclusive experiments of
Lechartier and Bellamy, and the answer was subsequently confirmed and
explained by the experiments and the reasoning of Pasteur. Berard
only showed the absorption of oxygen and the production of carbonic
acid; Lechartier and Bellamy proved the production of alcohol, thus
completing the evidence that it was a case of real fermentation,
though the common alcoholic ferment was absent.

*****

So full was Pasteur of the idea that the cells of a fruit would
continue to live at the expense of the sugar of the fruit, that once
in his laboratory, while conversing on these subjects with M. Dumas,
he exclaimed, 'I will wager that if a grape be plunged into an
atmosphere of carbonic acid, it will produce alcohol and carbonic acid
by the continued life of its own cells--that they will act for a time
like the cells of the true alcoholic leaven.' He made the experiment,
and found the result to be what he had foreseen. He then extended the
'enquiry. Placing under a bell-jar twenty-four plums, he filled the
jar with carbonic acid gas; beside it he placed twenty-four similar
plums uncovered. At the end of eight days, he removed the plums from
the jar, and compared them with the others. The difference was
extraordinary. The uncovered fruits had become soft, watery, and very
sweet; the others were firm and hard, their fleshy portions being not
at all watery. They had, moreover, lost a considerable quantity of
their sugar. They were afterwards bruised, and the juice was
distilled. It yielded six and a half grammes of alcohol, or one per
cent. of the total weight of the plums. Neither in these plums, nor
in the grapes first experimented on by Pasteur, could any trace of the
ordinary alcoholic leaven be found. As previously proved by
Lechartier and Bellamy, the fermentation was the work of the living
cells of the fruit itself, after air had been denied to them. When,
moreover, the cells were destroyed by bruising, no fermentation
ensued. The fermentation was the correlative of a vital act, and it
ceased when life was extinguished.

Luedersdorf was the first to show by this method that yeast acted,
not, as Liebig had assumed, in virtue of its organic, but in virtue of
its organised character. He destroyed the cells of yeast by rubbing
them on a ground glass p