ut of the
bottom story, the result of which is that all the others fall.

As chemistry advanced, facts came to light which put a new face upon
Stahl's hypothesis, and gave it a safer foundation than it previously
possessed. The general nature of these phenomena may be thus stated:--A
body, A, without giving to, or taking from, another body B, any material
particles, causes B to decompose into other substances, C, D, E, the sum
of the weights of which is equal to the weight of B, which decomposes.
Thus, bitter almonds contain two substances, amygdalin and synaptase,
which can be extracted, in a separate state, from the bitter almonds. The
amygdalin thus obtained, if dissolved in water, undergoes no change; but
if a little synaptase be added to the solution, the amygdalin splits up
into bitter almond oil, prussic acid, and a kind of sugar.

A short time after Cagniard de la Tour discovered the yeast plant,
Liebig, struck with the similarity between this and other such processes
and the fermentation of sugar, put forward the hypothesis that yeast
contains a substance which acts upon sugar, as synaptase acts upon
amygdalin. And as the synaptase is certainly neither organized nor alive,
but a mere chemical substance, Liebig treated Cagniard de la Tour's
discovery with no small contempt, and, from that time to the present, has
steadily repudiated the notion that the decomposition of the sugar is, in
any sense, the result of the vital activity of the _Torula_. But, though
the notion that the _Torula_ is a creature which eats sugar and excretes
carbonic acid and alcohol, which is not unjustly ridiculed in the most
surprising paper that ever made its appearance in a grave scientific
journal,[4] may be untenable, the fact that the _Toruloe_ are alive, and
that yeast does not excite fermentation unless it contains living
_Toruloe_, stands fast. Moreover, of late years, the essential
participation of living organisms in fermentation other than the
alcoholic, has been clearly made out by Pasteur and other chemists.

[Footnote 4: "Das entraethselte Geheimniss der geistigen Gaehrung
(Vorlaenfige briefliche Mittheilung)" is the title of an anonymous
contribution to Woehler and Liebig's _Annalen der Pharmacie_ for 1839, in
which a somewhat Rabelaisian imaginary description of the organisation of
the "yeast animals" and of the manner in which their functions are
performed, is given with a circumstantiality worthy of the author of
_Gull