It was Pasteur who in 1857 first propounded the true cause and process of fermentation. The breaking down of sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid gas had been known, of course, for a long period. Since the time of Spallanzani (1776) the putrefactive changes in liquids and organic matter had been prevented by boiling and subsequently sealing the flask or vessel containing the fluid. Moreover, this successful preventive practice had been in some measure correctly interpreted as due to the exclusion of the atmosphere, but wrongly credited to the exclusion of the oxygen of the air. It was not until the beginning of the present century that authorities modified their view and declared in favour of yeast cells as the agents in the production of fermentation. That this process was due to oxygen _per se_ was disproved by Schwann, who showed that so long as the oxygen admitted to the flask of fermentative fluid was sterilised no fermentation occurred. It was thus obvious that it was not the atmosphere or the oxygen of the atmosphere, but some fermenting agent borne into the flask by the admission of unsterilised air. It was but a step to further establish this hypothesis by adding unsterilised air plus some antiseptic substance which would destroy the fermenting agent. Arsenic was found by Schwann to have this germicidal faculty. Hence Schwann supported Latour's theory that fermentation was due to something borne in by the air, and that this something was yeast. Passing over a number of counter-experiments of Helmholtz and others, we come to the work of Liebig. He viewed the transformation of sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid gas simply and solely as a non-vital chemical process, depending upon the dead yeast communicating its own decomposition to surrounding elements in contact with it. Liebig insisted that all albuminoid bodies were unstable, and if left to themselves would fall to pieces--_i. e._, ferment--without the aid of living organisms, or any initiative force greater than dead yeast cells. It was at this juncture that Pasteur intervened to dispel the obscurities and contradictory theories which had been propounded.