The vinegar manufacturers of Orleans did not suspect the role of the mother of vinegar in the production of this article when they were employing empirical processes that had been established by practice. The vats were often infested by small worms ("vinegar eals") which disputed with the mycoderma for the oxygen, killed it through submersion, and caused the loss of batches that had been under troublesome preparation for months. Since Mr. Pasteur's researches, the Mycoderma aceti has been sown directly in the slightly acidified wine, and an excellent quality of vinegar has thus been obtained, with no fear of an occurrence of the disasters that accompanied the old process.
Another example will show us the microbes in activity in the earth. Let us take a pinch of vegetable mould, water it with ammonia compounds, and analyze it, and we shall find nitrates therein. Whence came these nitrates? They came from the oxidation of the ammonia compounds brought about by moistening, since the nitrogen of the air does not seem to combine under normal conditions with the surrounding oxygen. This oxidation of ammonia compounds is brought about, as has been shown by Messrs. Schloesing and Muntz, by a special ferment, the Micrococcus nitrificans, that belongs to the group of Bacteriacæ. In fact, the vapors of chloroform, which anesthetize plants, also prevent nitrification, since they anaesthetize the nitric ferment. So, too, when we heat vegetable humus to 100°, nitrification is arrested, because the ferment is killed. Finally, we may sow the nitric ferment in calcined earth and cause nitrification to occur therein as surely as we can bring about a fermentation in wine by sowing Mycoderma aceti in it.
The nitric ferment exists in all soils and in all latitudes, and converts the ammoniacal matters carried along by the rain into nitrates of a form most assimilable by plants. It therefore constitutes one of the important elements for fertilizing the earth.
Finally, we must refer to the numerous bacteria that occasion putrefaction in vegetable or animal organisms. These microbes, which float in the air, fall upon dead animals or plants, develop thereon, and convert into mineral matters the immediate principles of which the tissues are composed, and thus continually restore to the air and soil the elements necessary for the formation of new organic substances. Thus, Bacillus amylobacter (Fig. 2, II.), as Mr. Van Tieghem has shown, subsists upon the hydrocarbons contained in plants, and disorganizes vegetable tissues in disengaging hydrogen, carbonic acid, and vegetable acids. Bacterium roseopersicina forms, in pools, rosy or red pellicles that cover vegetable debris and disengage gases of an offensive odor. This bacterium develops in so great quantity upon low shores covered with fragments of algæ as to sometimes spread over an extent of several kilometers. These microbes, like many others, continuously mineralize organic substances, and thus exhibit themselves as the indispensable agents of the movement of the matter that incessantly circulates from the mineral to the organic world, and vice versa.--Science et Nature.
Palms sprouted from seeds kept warm by contact of the vessel with the water boiler of a kitchen range are grown by a man in New York.
EPITAPHIUM CHYMICUM.
The following epitaph was written by a Dr. Godfrey, who died in Dublin in 1755: