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M. Bechamp has applied Mitscherlich's observation, concerning the soluble fermentative part of yeast, to fungoid growths, and has made the interesting discovery that fungoid growths, like yeast, yield to water a substance that inverts sugar. When the production of fungoid growths is prevented by means of an antiseptic, the inversion of sugar does not take place.
The tobacco, after being ground and mixed with certain ingredients, is allowed to undergo a fermentation which lasts for weeks, and indeed for months. In the different methods of preparing snuff the fermentations take place in different ways, and sometimes the tobacco is subjected to two or three different fermentative actions.
Seemingly, then, there is as great a future in the development of this fermentative industry as there has been in the past in the development of the fermentative industry associated with brewing and vinting. Opium for smoking purposes is commonly allowed to undergo a curing process which lasts several months. This appears to be somewhat similar to the curing of tobacco.
The importance of these results can escape no one; they prove clearly that the fermentative character is not an invariable phenomenon of yeast-life, they show that yeast is a plant which does not differ from ordinary plants, and which manifests its fermentative power solely in consequence of particular conditions under which it is compelled to live.
On the other hand, their causal connection with fermentative and putrefactive processes was entirely obscured by the overshadowing weight of the chemist Liebig, who believed that fermentations and putrefactions were simply chemical processes.
M. Schutzenberger asserts that in doing this we lay down a doubtful hypothesis, and he thinks that this power, which he terms FERMENTATIVE ENERGY, may be estimated more correctly by the quantity of sugar decomposed by the unit-weight of yeast in unit-time; moreover, since our experiments show that yeast is very vigorous when it has a sufficient supply of oxygen, and that, in such a case, it can decompose much sugar in a little time, M. Schutzenberger concludes that it must then have great power as a ferment, even greater than when it performs its functions without the aid of air, since under this condition it decomposes sugar very slowly.
When thrown up by one quantity of malt or vinous liquid, it may be preserved to be put into another, at a future period; on which it will exert a similar fermentative action. Yeast is likewise used in the making of bread, without which it would be heavy and unwholesome. It has a vinous sour odour, a bitter taste arising from the hops in the malt liquor, and it reddens the vegetable blues.
It is much easier to conceive from this doctrine of associated or sympathetic motions of distant parts of the system, how it happens, that the variolous infection can be received but once, as before explained; than by supposing, that a change is effected in the mass of blood by any kind of fermentative process.
The whole of the great fermentative industries, in which are invested hundreds of millions of dollars, is based upon chemical decompositions produced by microscopic plants. In the great part of commercial fermentations alcohol is the product desired, and alcohol, though it is sometimes produced by bacteria, is in commercial quantities produced only by yeasts.
In other words, when its respiratory power becomes null, its fermentative power is at its greatest. In presence of abundant air supply, yeast vegetates with extraordinary activity. We see this in the weight of new yeast, comparatively large, that may be formed in the course of a few hours.
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