Immediately after that episode a fresh adversary, M. Frémy, a member of the Académie des Sciences, began with Pasteur a discussion, which was destined to be a long one, on the question of the origin of ferments. M. Frémy alluded to the fact that he had given many years to that subject, having published a notice on lactic fermentation as far back as 1841, “at a time,” he said, “when our learned colleague--M. Pasteur--was barely entering into science.”... “In the production of wine,” said M. Frémy, “it is the juice of the fruit itself, which, put in contact with air, gives birth to grains of yeast by the transformation of albuminous matter, whilst M. Pasteur declares that the grains of yeast are produced by germs.” According to M. Frémy, ferments did not come from atmospheric dusts, but were created by organic bodies. And, inventing for his own use the new word _hemiorganism_, M. Frémy explained the word and the action by saying that there are some _hemiorganized_ bodies which, by reason of the vital force with which they are endowed, go through successive decompositions and give birth to new derivatives; thus are ferments engendered. Another colleague, M. Trécul, a botanist and a genuine truth-seeking _savant_, arose in his turn. He said he had witnessed a whole transformation of microscopic species each into the other, and in support of this theory he invoked the names of the three inseparables--Pouchet, Musset and Joly. Himself a heterogenist, he had in 1867 given a definition to which he willingly alluded: “Heterogenesis is a natural operation by which life, on the point of abandoning an organized body, concentrates its action on some particles of that body and forms thereof beings quite different from that of the substance which has been borrowed.” Old arguments and renewed negations were brought forward, and Pasteur knew well that this was but a reappearance of the old quarrel; he therefore answered by going straight to the point. At the Académie des Sciences, on December 26, 1871, he addressed M. Trécul in these words: “I can assure our learned colleague that he might have found in the treatises I have published decisive answers to most of the questions he has raised. I am really surprised to see him tackle the question of so-called spontaneous generation, without having more at his disposal than doubtful facts and incomplete observations. My astonishment was not less than at our last sitting, when M. Frémy entered upon the same debate with nothing to produce but superannuated opinions and not one new positive fact.”