“1.—We may term matter _organizable_ as long as the globulines composing it are not yet visible to microscopes of existing power. “2.—We may speak of _amorphous_ or _globuline tissue_ when even the globulines, previously invisible, have increased so as to be seen under the microscope, the term amorphous, or shapeless, being here applied to the association of globulines, and not to the globulines themselves. “3.—Then we have _vesicular tissue_, when the globulines, continuing to increase, have developed in such a manner as to present a mass of continuous vesicles, still empty or already containing a new generation of globulines. “4.—Lastly we have _filamentous_ or _tubular tissue_, when the globulines, instead of vesiculating, form threads or tubes.”[72] Such are the purely hypothetical and exploded ideas which MM. Fremy, Trécul, Béchamp, H. Hoffmann, Hallier, and others would revive in our own day, in opposition to a theory so clear and so well supported by facts as that of germs floating in the air, or spread over the surface of objects, as fruits, dry or green wood, and so on. M. Béchamp believes that he has discovered that _mother of vinegar_, introduced into various saccharine liquids, in the presence of carbonate of lime, generates bacteria, which, with the sugar or dregs, produce butyric, lactic, and acetic acids, and that this same mother of vinegar, without the addition of the carbonate of lime, “generates, on the other hand, the fine cells, which produce the normal alcoholic fermentation of cane sugar.” Further, M. Béchamp advances the hypothesis that mother of vinegar is a conglomeration of _microzymata_, and, as he fails to see in the experiments on which he bases the conclusions which we have just given, that bacteria and ferment cells are the result of spontaneous impregnation, having no connection with the presence of mother of vinegar, on which he experimented, he arrives at this conclusion: “In the experiments which I have just described, things happened as though the microzyma, under some peculiarly favourable conditions, had been the parent both of the bacteria and the cells.”[73] ... The object of the following experiments was the study of these assumed transformations of the _mycoderma aceti_ in saccharine liquids, in the presence and in the absence of carbonate of lime. We prepared some two-necked flasks, containing as a growing medium a liquid composed of one-third of Orleans vinegar, and two-thirds of a white wine used by vinegar-makers in Orleans. This liquid is peculiarly adapted to the development of _mycoderma aceti_.