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+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of Yeast, by Thomas H. Huxley***
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+Title:  Yeast
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+Author:  Thomas H. Huxley
+
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+
+YEAST
+
+by Thomas H. Huxley
+
+
+
+
+I HAVE selected to-night the particular subject of Yeast for two
+reasons--or, rather, I should say for three.  In the first place,
+because it is one of the simplest and the most familiar objects with
+which we are acquainted.  In the second place, because the facts and
+phenomena which I have to describe are so simple that it is possible to
+put them before you without the help of any of those pictures or
+diagrams which are needed when matters are more complicated, and which,
+if I had to refer to them here, would involve the necessity of my
+turning away from you now and then, and thereby increasing very largely
+my difficulty (already sufficiently great) in making myself heard.  And
+thirdly, I have chosen this subject because I know of no familiar
+substance forming part of our every-day knowledge and experience, the
+examination of which, with a little care, tends to open up such very
+considerable issues as does this substance--yeast.
+
+In the first place, I should like to call your attention to a fact with
+which the whole of you are, to begin with, perfectly acquainted, I mean
+the fact that any liquid containing sugar, any liquid which is formed
+by pressing out the succulent parts of the fruits of plants, or a
+mixture of honey and water, if left to itself for a short time, begins
+to undergo a peculiar change.  No matter how clear it might be at
+starting, yet after a few hours, or at most a few days, if the
+temperature is high, this liquid begins to be turbid, and by-and-by
+bubbles make their appearance in it, and a sort of dirty-looking
+yellowish foam or scum collects at the surface; while at the same time,
+by degrees, a similar kind of matter, which we call the "lees," sinks
+to the bottom.
+
+The quantity of this dirty-looking stuff, that we call the scum and the
+lees, goes on increasing until it reaches a certain amount, and then it
+stops; and by the time it stops, you find the liquid in which this
+matter has been formed has become altered in its quality.  To begin
+with it was a mere sweetish substance, having the flavour of whatever
+might be the plant from which it was expressed, or having merely the
+taste and the absence of smell of a solution of sugar; but by the time
+that this change that I have been briefly describing to you is
+accomplished the liquid has become completely altered, it has acquired a
+peculiar smell, and, what is still more remarkable, it has gained the
+property of intoxicating the person who drinks it.  Nothing can be more
+innocent than a solution of sugar; nothing can be less innocent, if
+taken in excess, as you all know, than those fermented matters which are
+produced from sugar.  Well, again, if you notice that bubbling, or, as
+it were, seething of the liquid, which has accompanied the whole of
+this process, you will find that it is produced by the evolution of
+little bubbles of air-like substance out of the liquid; and I dare say
+you all know this air-like substance is not like common air; it is not
+a substance which a man can breathe with impunity. You often hear of
+accidents which take place in brewers' vats when men go in carelessly,
+and get suffocated there without knowing that there was anything evil
+awaiting them.  And if you tried the experiment with this liquid I am
+telling of while it was fermenting, you would find that any small
+animal let down into the vessel would be similarly stifled; and you
+would discover that a light lowered down into it would go out.  Well,
+then, lastly, if after this liquid has been thus altered you expose it
+to that process which is called distillation; that is to say, if you
+put it into a still, and collect the matters which are sent over, you
+obtain, when you first heat it, a clear transparent liquid, which,
+however, is something totally different from water; it is much lighter;
+it has a strong smell, and it has an acrid taste; and it possesses the
+same intoxicating power as the original liquid, but in a much more
+intense degree.  If you put a light to it, it burns with a bright
+flame, and it is that substance which we know as spirits of wine.
+
+Now these facts which I have just put before you--all but the last--have
+been known from extremely remote antiquity.  It is, I hope one of the
+best evidences of the antiquity of the human race, that among the
+earliest records of all kinds of men, you find a time recorded when
+they got drunk.  We may hope that that must have been a very late period
+in their history.  Not only have we the record of what happened to
+Noah, but if we turn to the traditions of a different people, those
+forefathers of ours who lived in the high lands of Northern India, we
+find that they were not less addicted to intoxicating liquids; and I
+have no doubt that the knowledge of this process extends far beyond the
+limits of historically recorded time.  And it is a very curious thing
+to observe that all the names we have of this process, and all that
+belongs to it, are names that have their roots not in our present
+language, but in those older languages which go back to the times at
+which this country was peopled.  That word "fermentation" for example,
+which is the title we apply to the whole process, is a Latin term; and a
+term which is evidently based upon the fact of the effervescence of the
+liquid.  Then the French, who are very fond of calling themselves a
+Latin race, have a particular word for ferment, which is 'levure'. And,
+in the same way, we have the word "leaven," those two words having
+reference to the heaving up, or to the raising of the substance which
+is fermented.  Now those are words which we get from what I may call
+the Latin side of our parentage; but if we turn to the Saxon side,
+there are a number of names connected with this process of fermentation.
+For example, the Germans call fermentation--and the old Germans did
+so--"gahren;" and they call anything which is used as a ferment by such
+names, such as "gheist" and "geest," and finally in low German,
+"yest";" and that word you know is the word our Saxon forefathers used,
+and is almost the same as the word which is commonly employed in this
+country to denote the common ferment of which I have been speaking.  So
+they have another name, the word "hefe," which is derived from their
+verb "heben," which signifies to raise up; and they have yet a third
+name, which is also one common in this country (I do not know whether it
+is common in Lancashire, but it is certainly very common in the Midland
+countries), the word "barm," which is derived from a root which
+signifies to raise or to bear up.  Barm is a something borne up; and
+thus there is much more real relation than is commonly supposed by those
+who make puns, between the beer which a man takes down his throat and
+the bier upon which that process, if carried to excess, generally lands
+him, for they are both derived from the root signifying bearing up; the
+one thing is borne upon men's shoulders, and the other is the fermented
+liquid which was borne up by the fermentation taking place in itself.
+
+Again, I spoke of the produce of fermentation as "spirit of wine."  Now
+what a very curious phrase that is, if you come to think of it.  The
+old alchemists talked of the finest essence of anything as if it had
+the same sort of relation to the thing itself as a man's spirit is
+supposed to have to his body; and so they spoke of this fine essence of
+the fermented liquid as being the spirit of the liquid.  Thus came
+about that extraordinary ambiguity of language, in virtue of which you
+apply precisely the same substantive name to the soul of man and to a
+glass of gin! And then there is still yet one other most curious piece
+of nomenclature connected with this matter, and that is the word
+"alcohol" itself, which is now so familiar to everybody.  Alcohol
+originally meant a very fine powder.  The women of the Arabs and other
+Eastern people are in the habit of tinging their eyelashes with a very
+fine black powder which is made of antimony, and they call that
+"kohol;" and the "al" is simply the article put in front of it, so as to
+say "the kohol."  And up to the 17th century in this country the word
+alcohol was employed to signify any very fine powder; you find it in
+Robert Boyle's works that he uses "alcohol" for a very fine subtle
+powder.  But then this name of anything very fine and very subtle came
+to be specially connected with the fine and subtle spirit obtained from
+the fermentation of sugar; and I believe that the first person who
+fairly fixed it as the proper name of what we now commonly call spirits
+of wine, was the great French chemist Lavoisier, so comparatively recent
+is the use of the word alcohol in this specialised sense.
+
+So much by way of general introduction to the subject on which I have to
+speak to-night. What I have hitherto stated is simply what we may call
+common knowledge, which everybody may acquaint himself with.  And you
+know that what we call scientific knowledge is not any kind of
+conjuration, as people sometimes suppose, but it is simply the
+application of the same principles of common sense that we apply to
+common knowledge, carried out, if I may so speak, to knowledge which is
+uncommon.  And all that we know now of this substance, yeast, and all
+the very strange issues to which that knowledge has led us, have simply
+come out of the inveterate habit, and a very fortunate habit for the
+human race it is, which scientific men have of not being content until
+they have routed out all the different chains and connections of
+apparently simple phenomena, until they have taken them to pieces and
+understood the conditions upon which they depend.  I will try to point
+out to you now what has happened in consequence of endeavouring to
+apply this process of "analysis," as we call it, this teazing out of an
+apparently simple fact into all the little facts of which it is made up,
+to the ascertained facts relating to the barm or the yeast; secondly,
+what has come of the attempt to ascertain distinctly what is the nature
+of the products which are produced by fermentation; then what has come
+of the attempt to understand the relation between the yeast and the
+products; and lastly, what very curious side issues if I may so call
+them--have branched out in the course of this inquiry, which has now
+occupied somewhere about two centuries.
+
+The first thing was to make out precisely and clearly what was the
+nature of this substance, this apparently mere scum and mud that we
+call yeast.  And that was first commenced seriously by a wonderful old
+Dutchman of the name of Leeuwenhoek, who lived some two hundred years
+ago, and who was the first person to invent thoroughly trustworthy
+microscopes of high powers.  Now, Leeuwenhoek went to work upon this
+yeast mud, and by applying to it high powers of the microscope, he
+discovered that it was no mere mud such as you might at first suppose,
+but that it was a substance made up of an enormous multitude of minute
+grains, each of which had just as definite a form as if it were a grain
+of corn, although it was vastly smaller, the largest of these not being
+more than the two-thousandth of an inch in diameter; while, as you
+know, a grain of corn is a large thing, and the very smallest of these
+particles were not more than the seven-thousandth of an inch in
+diameter.  Leeuwenhoek saw that this muddy stuff was in reality a
+liquid, in which there were floating this immense number of definitely
+shaped particles, all aggregated in heaps and lumps and some of them
+separate. That discovery remained, so to speak, dormant for fully a
+century, and then the question was taken up by a French discoverer,
+who, paying great attention and having the advantage of better
+instruments than Leeuwenhoek had, watched these things and made the
+astounding discovery that they were bodies which were constantly being
+reproduced and growing; than when one of these rounded bodies was once
+formed and had grown to its full size, it immediately began to give off
+a little bud from one side, and then that bud grew out until it had
+attained the full size of the first, and that, in this way, the yeast
+particle was undergoing a process of multiplication by budding, just as
+effectual and just as complete as the process of multiplication of a
+plant by budding; and thus this Frenchman, Cagniard de la Tour, arrived
+at the conclusion--very creditable to his sagacity, and which has been
+confirmed by every observation and reasoning since--that this
+apparently muddy refuse was neither more nor less than a mass of
+plants, of minute living plants, growing and multiplying in the sugary
+fluid in which the yeast is formed.  And from that time forth we have
+known this substance which forms the scum and the lees as the yeast
+plant; and it has received a scientific name--which I may use without
+thinking of it, and which I will therefore give you--namely, "Torula."
+Well, this was a capital discovery.  The next thing to do was to make
+out how this torula was related to the other plants.  I won't weary you
+with the whole course of investigation, but I may sum up its results,
+and they are these--that the torula is a particular kind of a fungus, a
+particular state rather, of a fungus or mould.  There are many moulds
+which under certain conditions give rise to this torula condition, to a
+substance which is not distinguishable from yeast, and which has the
+same properties as yeast--that is to say, which is able to decompose
+sugar in the curious way that we shall consider by-and-by.  So that the
+yeast plant is a plant belonging to a group of the Fungi, multiplying
+and growing and living in this very remarkable manner in the sugary
+fluid which is, so to speak, the nidus or home of the yeast.
+
+That, in a few words, is, as far as investigation--by the help of one's
+eye and by the help of the microscope--has taken us.  But now there is
+an observer whose methods of observation are more refined than those of
+men who use their eye, even though it be aided by the microscope; a man
+who sees indirectly further than we can see directly--that is, the
+chemist; and the chemist took up this question, and his discovery was
+not less remarkable than that of the microscopist.  The chemist
+discovered that the yeast plant being composed of a sort of bag, like a
+bladder, inside which is a peculiar soft, semifluid material--the
+chemist found that this outer bladder has the same composition as the
+substance of wood, that material which is called "cellulose," and which
+consists of the elements carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, without any
+nitrogen.  But then he also found (the first person to discover it was
+an Italian chemist, named
+
+Fabroni, in the end of the last century) that this inner matter which
+was contained in the bag, which constitutes the yeast plant, was a
+substance containing the elements carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and
+nitrogen; that it was what Fabroni called a vegeto-animal substance,
+and that it had the peculiarities of what are commonly called "animal
+products."
+
+This again was an exceedingly remarkable discovery.  It lay neglected
+for a time, until it was subsequently taken up by the great chemists of
+modern times, and they, with their delicate methods of analysis, have
+finally decided that, in all essential respects, the substance which
+forms the chief part of the contents of the yeast plant is identical
+with the material which forms the chief part of our own muscles, which
+forms the chief part of our own blood, which forms the chief part of
+the white of the egg; that, in fact, although this little organism is a
+plant, and nothing but a plant, yet that its active living contents
+contain a substance which is called "protein," which is of the same
+nature as the substance which forms the foundation of every animal
+organism whatever.
+
+Now we come next to the question of the analysis of the products, of
+that which is produced during the process of fermentation.  So far back
+as the beginning of the 16th century, in the times of transition
+between the old alchemy and the modern chemistry, there was a
+remarkable man, Von Helmont, a Dutchman, who saw the difference between
+the air which comes out of a vat where something is fermenting and
+common air.  He was the man who invented the term "gas," and he called
+this kind of gas "gas silvestre"--so to speak gas that is wild, and
+lives in out of the way places--having in his mind the identity of this
+particular kind of air with that which is found in some caves and
+cellars.  Then, the gradual process of investigation going on, it was
+discovered that this substance, then called "fixed air," was a poisonous
+gas, and it was finally identified with that kind of gas which is
+obtained by burning charcoal in the air, which is called "carbonic
+acid."  Then the substance alcohol was subjected to examination, and it
+was found to be a combination of carbon, and hydrogen, and oxygen. Then
+the sugar which was contained in the fermenting liquid was examined and
+that was found to contain the three elements carbon, hydrogen, and
+oxygen.  So that it was clear there were in sugar the fundamental
+elements which are contained in the carbonic acid, and in the alcohol.
+And then came that great chemist Lavoisier, and he examined into the
+subject carefully, and possessed with that brilliant thought of his
+which happens to be propounded exactly apropos to this matter of
+fermentation--that no matter is ever lost, but that matter only changes
+its form and changes its combinations--he endeavoured to make out what
+became of the sugar which was subjected to fermentation.  He thought he
+discovered that the whole weight of the sugar was represented by the
+carbonic acid produced; that in other words, supposing this tumbler to
+represent the sugar, that the action of fermentation was as it were the
+splitting of it, the one half going away in the shape of carbonic acid,
+and the other half going away in the shape of alcohol.  Subsequent
+inquiry, careful research with the refinements of modern chemistry,
+have been applied to this problem, and they have shown that Lavoisier
+was not quite correct; that what he says is quite true for about 95 per
+cent. of the sugar, but that the other 5 per cent., or nearly so, is
+converted into two other things; one of them, matter which is called
+succinic acid, and the other matter which is called glycerine, which
+you all know now as one of the commonest of household matters.  It may
+be that we have not got to the end of this refined analysis yet, but at
+any rate, I suppose I may say--and I speak with some little hesitation
+for fear my friend Professor Roscoe here may pick me up for trespassing
+upon his province--but I believe I may say that now we can account for
+99 per cent. at least of the sugar, and that 99 per cent. is split up
+into these four things, carbonic acid, alcohol, succinic acid, and
+glycerine. So that it may be that none of the sugar whatever
+disappears, and that only its parts, so to speak, are re-arranged, and
+if any of it disappears, certainly it is a very small portion.
+
+Now these are the facts of the case.  There is the fact of the growth of
+the yeast plant; and there is the fact of the splitting up of the
+sugar.  What relation have these two facts to one another?
+
+For a very long time that was a great matter of dispute.  The early
+French observers, to do them justice, discerned the real state of the
+case, namely, that there was a very close connection between the actual
+life of the yeast plant and this operation of the splitting up of the
+sugar; and that one was in some way or other connected with the other.
+All investigation subsequently has confirmed this original idea.  It
+has been shown that if you take any measures by which other plants of
+like kind to the torula would be killed, and by which the yeast plant
+is killed, then the yeast loses its efficiency.  But a capital
+experiment upon this subject was made by a very distinguished man,
+Helmholz, who performed an experiment of this kind.  He had two
+vessels--one of them we will suppose full of yeast, but over the bottom
+of it, as this might be, was tied a thin film of bladder; consequently,
+through that thin film of bladder all the liquid parts of the yeast
+would go, but the solid parts would be stopped behind; the torula would
+be stopped, the liquid parts of the yeast would go.  And then he took
+another vessel containing a fermentable solution of sugar, and he put
+one inside the other; and in this way you see the fluid parts of the
+yeast were able to pass through with the utmost ease into the sugar, but
+the solid parts could not get through at all.  And he judged thus:  if
+the fluid parts are those which excite fermentation, then, inasmuch as
+these are stopped, the sugar will not ferment; and the sugar did not
+ferment, showing quite clearly, that an immediate contact with the
+solid, living torula was absolutely necessary to excite this process of
+splitting up of the sugar.  This experiment was quite conclusive as to
+this particular point, and has had very great fruits in other
+directions.
+
+Well, then, the yeast plant being essential to the production of
+fermentation, where does the yeast plant come from?  Here, again, was
+another great problem opened up, for, as I said at starting, you have,
+under ordinary circumstances in warm weather, merely to expose some
+fluid containing a solution of sugar, or any form of syrup or vegetable
+juice to the air, in order, after a comparatively short time, to see
+all these phenomena of fermentation.  Of course the first obvious
+suggestion is, that the torula has been generated within the fluid.  In
+fact, it seems at first quite absurd to entertain any other conviction;
+but that belief would most assuredly be an erroneous one.
+
+Towards the beginning of this century, in the vigorous times of the old
+French wars, there was a Monsieur Appert, who had his attention
+directed to the preservation of things that ordinarily perish, such as
+meats and vegetables, and in fact he laid the foundation of our modern
+method of preserving meats; and he found that if he boiled any of these
+substances and then tied them so as to exclude the air, that they would
+be preserved for any time.  He tried these experiments, particularly
+with the must of wine and with the wort of beer; and he found that if
+the wort of beer had been carefully boiled and was stopped in such a way
+that the air could not get at it, it would never ferment.  What was the
+reason of this?  That, again, became the subject of a long string of
+experiments, with this ultimate result, that if you take precautions to
+prevent any solid matters from getting into the must of wine or the wort
+of beer, under these circumstances--that is to say, if the fluid has
+been boiled and placed in a bottle, and if you stuff the neck of the
+bottle full of cotton wool, which allows the air to go through and
+stops anything of a solid character however fine, then you may let it
+be for ten years and it will not ferment.  But if you take that plug
+out and give the air free access, then, sooner or later fermentation
+will set up.  And there is no doubt whatever that fermentation is
+excited only by the presence of some torula or other, and that that
+torula proceeds in our present experience, from pre-existing torulae.
+These little bodies are excessively light.  You can easily imagine what
+must be the weight of little particles, but slightly heavier than water,
+and not more than the two-thousandth or perhaps seven-thousandth of an
+inch in diameter.  They are capable of floating about and dancing like
+motes in the sunbeam; they are carried about by all sorts of currents
+of air; the great majority of them perish; but one or two, which may
+chance to enter into a sugary solution, immediately enter into active
+life, find there the conditions of their nourishment, increase and
+multiply, and may give rise to any quantity whatever of this substance
+yeast.  And, whatever may be true or not be true about this
+"spontaneous generation," as it is called in regard to all other kinds
+of living things, it is perfectly certain, as regards yeast, that it
+always owes its origin to this process of transportation or inoculation,
+if you like so to call it, from some other living yeast organism; and
+so far as yeast is concerned, the doctrine of spontaneous generation is
+absolutely out of court.  And not only so, but the yeast must be alive
+in order to exert these peculiar properties.  If it be crushed, if it be
+heated so far that its life is destroyed, that peculiar power of
+fermentation is not excited.  Thus we have come to this conclusion, as
+the result of our inquiry, that the fermentation of sugar, the
+splitting of the sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid, glycerine, and
+succinic acid, is the result of nothing but the vital activity of this
+little fungus, the torula.
+
+And now comes the further exceedingly difficult inquiry--how is it that
+this plant, the torula, produces this singular operation of the
+splitting up of the sugar?  Fabroni, to whom I referred some time ago,
+imagined that the effervescence of fermentation was produced in just the
+same way as the effervescence of a sedlitz powder, that the yeast was a
+kind of acid, and that the sugar was a combination of carbonic acid and
+some base to form the alcohol, and that the yeast combined with this
+substance, and set free the carbonic acid; just as when you add
+carbonate of soda to acid you turn out the carbonic acid.  But of course
+the discovery of Lavoisier that the carbonic acid and the alcohol taken
+together are very nearly equal in weight to the sugar, completely upset
+this hypothesis.  Another view was therefore taken by the French
+chemist, Thenard, and it is still held by a very eminent chemist, M.
+Pasteur, and their view is this, that the yeast, so to speak, eats a
+little of the sugar, turns a little of it to its own purposes, and by
+so doing gives such a shape to the sugar that the rest of it breaks up
+into carbonic acid and alcohol.
+
+Well, then, there is a third hypothesis, which is maintained by another
+very distinguished chemist, Liebig, which denies either of the other
+two, and which declares that the particles of the sugar are, as it
+were, shaken asunder by the forces at work in the yeast plant.  Now I
+am not going to take you into these refinements of chemical theory, I
+cannot for a moment pretend to do so, but I may put the case before you
+by an analogy.  Suppose you compare the sugar to a card house, and
+suppose you compare the yeast to a child coming near the card house,
+then Fabroni's hypothesis was that the child took half the cards away;
+Thenard's and Pasteur's hypothesis is that the child pulls out the
+bottom card and thus makes it tumble to pieces; and Liebig's hypothesis
+is that the child comes by and shakes the table and tumbles the house
+down.  I appeal to my friend here (Professor Roscoe) whether that is not
+a fair statement of the case.
+
+Having thus, as far as I can, discussed the general state of the
+question, it remains only that I should speak of some of those
+collateral results which have come in a very remarkable way out of the
+investigation of yeast.  I told you that it was very early observed that
+the yeast plant consisted of a bag made up of the same material as that
+which composes wood, and of an interior semifluid mass which contains a
+substance, identical in its composition, in a broad sense, with that
+which constitutes the flesh of animals.  Subsequently, after the
+structure of the yeast plant had been carefully observed, it was
+discovered that all plants, high and low, are made up of separate bags
+or "cells," as they are called; these bags or cells having the
+composition of the pure matter of wood; having the same composition,
+broadly speaking, as the sac of the yeast plant, and having in their
+interior a more or less fluid substance containing a matter of the same
+nature as the protein substance of the yeast plant.  And therefore this
+remarkable result came out--that however much a plant may differ from an
+animal, yet that the essential constituent of the contents of these
+various cells or sacs of which the plant is made up, the nitrogenous
+protein matter, is the same in the animal as in the plant.  And not only
+was this gradually discovered, but it was found that these semifluid
+contents of the plant cell had, in many cases, a remarkable power of
+contractility quite like that of the substance of animals. And about 24
+or 25 years ago, namely, about the year 1846, to the best of my
+recollection, a very eminent German botanist, Hugo Von Mohl, conferred
+upon this substance which is found in the interior of the plant cell,
+and which is identical with the matter found in the inside of the yeast
+cell, and which again contains an animal substance similar to that of
+which we ourselves are made up--he conferred upon this that title of
+"protoplasm," which has brought other people a great deal of trouble
+since!  I beg particularly to say that, because I find many people
+suppose that I was the inventor of that term, whereas it has been in
+existence for at least twenty-five years.  And then other observers,
+taking the question up, came to this astonishing conclusion (working
+from this basis of the yeast), that the differences between animals and
+plants are not so much in the fundamental substances which compose them,
+not in the protoplasm, but in the manner in which the cells of which
+their bodies are built up have become modified.  There is a sense in
+which it is true--and the analogy was pointed out very many years ago
+by some French botanists and chemists--there is a sense in which it is
+true that every plant is substantially an enormous aggregation of
+bodies similar to yeast cells, each having to a certain extent its own
+independent life.  And there is a sense in which it is also perfectly
+true--although it would be impossible for me to give the statement to
+you with proper qualifications and limitations on an occasion like
+this--but there is also a sense in which it is true that every animal
+body is made up of an aggregation of minute particles of protoplasm,
+comparable each of them to the individual separate yeast plant.  And
+those who are acquainted with the history of the wonderful revolution
+which has been worked in our whole conception of these matters in the
+last thirty years, will bear me out in saying that the first germ of
+them, to a very great extent, was made to grow and fructify by the study
+of the yeast plant, which presents us with living matter in almost its
+simplest condition.
+
+Then there is yet one last and most important bearing of this yeast
+question.  There is one direction probably in which the effects of the
+careful study of the nature of fermentation will yield results more
+practically valuable to mankind than any other.  Let me recall to your
+minds the fact which I stated at the beginning of this lecture. Suppose
+that I had here a solution of pure sugar with a little mineral matter
+in it; and suppose it were possible for me to take upon the point of a
+needle one single, solitary yeast cell, measuring no more perhaps than
+the three-thousandth of an inch in diameter--not bigger than one of
+those little coloured specks of matter in my own blood at this moment,
+the weight of which it would be difficult to express in the fraction of
+a grain--and put it into this solution.  From that single one, if the
+solution were kept at a fair temperature in a warm summer's day, there
+would be generated, in the course of a week, enough torulae to form a
+scum at the top and to form lees at the bottom, and to change the
+perfectly tasteless and entirely harmless fluid, syrup, into a solution
+impregnated with the poisonous gas carbonic acid, impregnated with the
+poisonous substance alcohol; and that, in virtue of the changes worked
+upon the sugar by the vital activity of these infinitesimally small
+plants.  Now you see that this is a case of infection.  And from the
+time that the phenomenon of fermentation were first carefully studied,
+it has constantly been suggested to the minds of thoughtful physicians
+that there was a something astoundingly similar between this phenomena
+of the propagation of fermentation by infection and contagion, and the
+phenomena of the propagation of diseases by infection and contagion.
+Out of this suggestion has grown that remarkable theory of many
+diseases which has been called the "germ theory of disease," the idea,
+in fact, that we owe a great many diseases to particles having a
+certain life of their own, and which are capable of being transmitted
+from one living being to another, exactly as the yeast plant is capable
+of being transmitted from one tumbler of saccharine substance to
+another.  And that is a perfectly tenable hypothesis, one which in the
+present state of medicine ought to be absolutely exhausted and shown not
+to be true, until we take to others which have less analogy in their
+favour.  And there are some diseases most assuredly in which it turns
+out to be perfectly correct.  There are some forms of what are called
+malignant carbuncle which have been shown to be actually effected by a
+sort of fermentation, if I may use the phrase, by a sort of disturbance
+and destruction of the fluids of the animal body, set up by minute
+organisms which are the cause of this destruction and of this
+disturbance; and only recently the study of the phenomena which
+accompany vaccination has thrown an immense light in this direction,
+tending to show by experiments of the same general character as that to
+which I referred as performed by Helmholz, that there is a most
+astonishing analogy between the contagion of that healing disease and
+the contagion of destructive diseases.  For it has been made out quite
+clearly, by investigations carried on in France and in this country,
+that the only part of the vaccine matter which is contagious, which is
+capable of carrying on its influence in the organism of the child who is
+vaccinated, is the solid particles and not the fluid.  By experiments
+of the most ingenious kind, the solid parts have been separated from
+the fluid parts, and it has then been discovered that you may vaccinate
+a child as much as you like with the fluid parts, but no effect takes
+place, though an excessively small portion of the solid particles, the
+most minute that can be separated, is amply sufficient to give rise to
+all the phenomena of the cow pock, by a process which we can compare to
+nothing but the transmission of fermentation from one vessel into
+another, by the transport to the one of the torula particles which
+exist in the other.  And it has been shown to be true of some of the
+most destructive diseases which infect animals, such diseases as the
+sheep pox, such diseases as that most terrible and destructive disorder
+of horses, glanders, that in these, also, the active power is the
+living solid particle, and that the inert part is the fluid. However,
+do not suppose that I am pushing the analogy too far.  I do not mean to
+say that the active, solid parts in these diseased matters are of the
+same nature as living yeast plants; but, so far as it goes, there is a
+most surprising analogy between the two; and the value of the analogy
+is this, that by following it out we may some time or other come to
+understand how these diseases are propagated, just as we understand,
+now, about fermentation; and that, in this way, some of the greatest
+scourges which afflict the human race may be, if not prevented, at
+least largely alleviated.
+
+This is the conclusion of the statements which I wished to put before
+you.  You see we have not been able to have any accessories.  If you
+will come in such numbers to hear a lecture of this kind, all I can say
+is, that diagrams cannot be made big enough for you, and that it is not
+possible to show any experiments illustrative of a lecture on such a
+subject as I have to deal with.  Of course my friends the chemists and
+physicists are very much better off, because they can not only show you
+experiments, but you can smell them and hear them!  But in my case such
+aids are not attainable, and therefore I have taken a simple subject and
+have dealt with it in such a way that I hope you all understand it, at
+least so far as I have been able to put it before you in words; and
+having once apprehended such of the ideas and simple facts of the case
+as it was possible to put before you, you can see for yourselves the
+great and wonderful issues of such an apparently homely subject.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Yeast, by Thomas H. Huxley
+
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