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Updated: May 24, 2025
Two days after impregnation the flask B began to show signs of fermentation. It follows that the deposit of vibrios of a completed butyric fermentation may be kept, at least for a certain time, without losing the power of causing fementation. It furnishes a butyric ferment, capable of revival and action in a suitable fresh fermentable medium.
We may here be permitted to add, as a purely historical matter, that it was these two observations just described, made successively one day in 1861, on vibrios and bacteria, that first suggested to us the idea of the possibility of life without air, and caused us to think that the vibrios which we met so frequently in our lactic fermentations must be the true butyric ferment.
The liquid, however, contained butyrate of lime, a salt possessing properties similar to those of the lactate. Why could not this salt equally well support the life of the vibrios? We kept the liquid under observation daily, and saw it gradually become brighter; this went on for fifteen days.
On several occasions we have determined this interesting fact, which tends to prove that the butyric vibrios cannot be regarded as another form of bacteria, inasmuch as, on the hypothesis of an original relation between the two productions, butyric fermentation ought in every case to follow the growth of bacteria.
It seems impossible to deny that we have here a case of the adaptation of an organism to the gradual contamination of the medium; and so it may likewise happen that the anaerobian vibrios of a butyric fermentation, which develop and multiply absolutely without free oxygen, perish immediately when suddenly taken out of their airless medium, and that the result might be different if they had been gradually brought under the action of air in small quantities at a time.
From that date onward they continued to come in increasing number, from certain points at the bottom of the flask, where a deposit of earthy phosphates existed; and at the same time the liquid, which for the first few days remained perfectly clear, began to grow turbid in consequence of the development of vibrios.
The explanation of the phenomenon, from our point of view, would be that, after a certain number of fisiparous generations, and under the influence of variations in the composition of the medium, which is constantly changing through fermentation as well as through the active life of the vibrios themselves, cysts, which are simply the refractive corpuscles, form along them at different points.
In his later researches, Dr. Brefeld has adopted the method which we have long employed for demonstrating the life and multiplication of butyric vibrios in the entire absence of air, as well as the method of conducting growths in mineral media associated with fermentable substance. We need not pause to consider certain other secondary criticisms of Dr. Brefeld.
Probably it was owing to some modification effected in the medium by the previous life of the bacteria, or to the special character of the vibrios used in impregnation. Before we go any further, let us devote some attention to the vibrios of the preceding fermentations. We refrained from impregnating it with any germs.
After the action of the air, only fine amorphous granules can be found, unfit for culture as well as for the transmission of any disease whatever. It might be said that the air burned the vibrios.
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