We have combated these propositions, so extraordinary and unsupported by any rigorous experiments, before the Academy of Sciences, where they were first enunciated. On that occasion we related the facts in connection with blood and urine, which we have just discussed. Could there be any more forcible argument against the theory of our honourable colleague than those facts? Here we had natural albuminous substances, forming part of matter eminently liable to putrefactive change and fermentation, which produced no ferments of any sort whatsoever when brought into contact with air deprived of its organic particles of dust. Under no known circumstances is albuminous matter transformed into grains of yeast or any other organized ferment, and, to our thinking, nothing can be more chimerical than the gratuitous hypothesis of _hemi-organism_. We shall proceed to new proofs of this, dealing this time with a liquid formed by the life of a vegetable. § III.—Experiments on the Juice contained in Grapes. In the course of the discussion which took place, at the Academy, on the subject of the generation of ferments, properly so called, much was said about the oldest known fermentation, that of wine. We at once resolved to demolish M. Fremy’s theory, by a decisive experiment on the juice of grapes. [Illustration: Fig. 8.] We prepared forty flasks, capable of holding from 250 c.c. to 300 c.c. (from 9 to 11 fl. oz.) and shaped as represented in Fig. 8. These we filled with filtered must, which was perfectly bright, and which, like all acid liquids, would remain sound, after having been boiled for a few seconds, although the ends of the long curved necks of the flasks containing the must might remain constantly open for months or years. We washed, in a few cubic centimetres of water, part of a bunch of grapes, washing the grapes separately, or the grapes and the wood together, or even the wood of the bunch alone. This washing was easily accomplished by means of a perfectly clean badger’s-hair brush, the water receiving all the particles of dust adhering to the surface of the grapes and the wood of the bunch. By means of a microscope we easily proved that this water held in suspension an infinite number of organized corpuscles, some of them bearing a very close resemblance to the spores of fungoid growths, others to alcoholic ferment, others to _mycoderma vini_, and so on.[35] [Illustration: Fig. 9.]