As might be expected, a microscopical examination of the particles of dust scattered over the surface of the fruit and woody peduncles of grapes, reveals great differences in the number of these fertile particles at different periods of the vegetation of the grapes. As long as the grapes are green and the vine in full activity we find scarcely any, or, at all events, very few spores which seem to belong to ordinary fungoid growths. Towards autumn, however, when the grape is ripening and the leaves becoming yellow, fungoid growths and numerous productions of great fertility accumulate on the vine, on the leaves, the branches, and the bunches. At this period we find the water in which the grapes and the woody parts of the bunches are washed swarming with different kinds of organized corpuscles; it is at this period, too, that the ferment-yielding moulds attain that phase of their vegetation in which, when mixed with the juice of grapes, they produce fermentation. In the Jura district a peculiar kind of wine, called straw wine (_vin de paille_), is manufactured, which seems to contradict what we have said as to the advent of sterility towards the end of winter in the yeast-germs formed on the surface of preserved bunches of grapes. This straw wine is made of grapes preserved for long after the vintage on straw. From what we have said it might be supposed that fermentation could not occur under these circumstances. We have, in fact, no doubt that it is often really produced by quite different yeast-germs from those which cause fermentation in the vintage gathered in autumn. Fermentation as effected in the manufacture of straw wine is probably due to yeast-dust spread over the utensils of the vine-grower, and derived from the preceding vintage. We have seen (Chap. III. § 6) that yeast may be dried and reduced to powder, and yet preserve its faculty of germination for several months. It would be useful, however, to submit this surmise to the test of experiment, and it would be easy to do so provided we took care to crush the grapes so preserved in very clean vessels, previously heated to a temperature of 100° C. (212° F.), having first rejected every bunch containing injured grapes, which might have fermented or given occasion to the development of yeast. Fermentation, we believe, would not then take place. [Illustration: Plate 10. One of the Ferments of Acid Fruits at the Commencement of Fermentation in its Natural Medium.]