In this beautiful work, and in all subsequent ones of which the ripening of fruits has been the subject, two facts of great theoretical value have escaped the notice of the authors; these are the two facts which Messrs. Lechartier and Bellamy pointed out, for the first time, namely, the production of alcohol and the absence of cells of ferments. It is worthy of remark that these two facts, as we have shown above, were actually foreshadowed in the theory of fermentation that we advocated as far back as 1861, and we are happy to add that Messrs. Lechartier and Bellamy, who, at first, had prudently drawn no theoretical conclusions from their work, now entirely agree with the theory we have advanced.[127] Their mode of reasoning is very different from that of the savants with whom we discussed the subject before the Academy, on the occasion when the communication which we addressed to the Academy, in October, 1872, attracted attention once more to the remarkable observations of Messrs. Lechartier and Bellamy.[128] M. Fremy, in particular, was desirous of finding in those observations a confirmation of his views on the subject of _hemi-organism_, and a condemnation of ours, notwithstanding the fact that the preceding explanations and, more particularly our Note of 1861, which we have quoted word for word in the last paragraph, furnish the most conclusive evidence in favour of those ideas which we advocate. Indeed, as far back as 1861 we pointed out very clearly that if we could find plants able to live when deprived of air, in the presence of sugar, they would bring about a fermentation of that substance, in the same manner as yeast does. Such is the case with the fungi already studied in Chapter IV.; such, too, is the case with the fruits employed in the experiments of Messrs. Lechartier and Bellamy, and in our own experiments, the results of which not only confirm those obtained by these gentlemen, but even extend them, in so far as we have shown that fruits, when surrounded with carbonic acid gas, immediately produce alcohol. When surrounded with air, they live in their aërobian state, and we have no ferment-action; immersed immediately afterwards in carbonic acid gas, they now assume their anaërobian state, and at once begin to act upon the sugar in the manner of ferments, and emit heat. As for seeing in these facts anything like a confirmation of the theory of hemi-organism, imagined by M. Fremy, the idea of such a thing is absurd. The following, for instance, is the theory of the fermentation of the vintage, according to M. Fremy.[129] “To speak here of alcoholic fermentation alone,”[130] our author says, “I hold that in the production of wine it is the juice of the fruit itself that, in contact with air, produces grains of ferment, by the transformation of the albuminous matter; M. Pasteur, on the other hand, maintains that the fermentation is produced by germs existing outside the skin of the grapes.”