manner:  “The albuminous substance on its way to decomposition possesses the power of communicating to certain other bodies that same state of mobility by which its own atoms are already affected; and through its contact with other bodies it imparts to them the power of decomposing or of entering into other combinations.”  Here Liebig failed to perceive that the ferment, in its capacity of a living organism, had anything to do with the fermentation.

This theory dates back as far as 1843.  In 1846 Messrs. Boutron and Fremy, in a Memoir on lactic fermentation, published in the Annales de Chimie et de Physique, strained the conclusions deducible from it to a most unjustifiable extent.  They asserted that one and the same nitrogenous substance might undergo various modifications in contact with air, so as to become successively alcoholic, lactic, butyric, and other ferments.  There is nothing more convenient than purely hypothetical theories, theories which are not the necessary consequences of facts; when fresh facts which cannot be reconciled with the original hypothesis are discovered, new hypotheses can be tacked on to the old ones.  This is exactly what Liebig and Fremy have done, each in his turn, under the pressure of our studies, commenced in 1857.  In 1864 Fremy devised the theory of hemi-organism, which meant nothing more than that he gave up Liebig’s theory of 1843, together with the additions which Boutron and he had made to it in 1846; in other words, he abandoned the idea of albuminous substances being ferments, to take up another idea, that albuminous substances in contact with air are peculiarly adapted to undergo organization into new beings—­that is, the living ferments which we had discovered—­and that the ferments of beer and of the grape have a common origin.

This theory of hemi-organism was word for word the antiquated opinion of Turpin. * * * The public, especially a certain section of the public did not go very deeply into an examination of the subject.  It was the period when the doctrine of spontaneous generation was being discussed with much warmth.  The new word hemi-organism, which was the only novelty in M. Fremy’s theory, deceived people.  It was thought that M. Fremy had really discovered the solution of the question of the day.  It is true that it was rather difficult to understand the process by which an albuminous substance could become all at once a living and budding cell.  This difficulty was solved by M. Fremy, who declared that it was the result of some power that was not yet understood, the power of “organic impulse.” [Footnote:  Fremy, Comptes rendus de l’Academie, vol. lviii., p. 1065, 1864.]

Liebig, who, as well as M. Fremy, was compelled to renounce his original opinions concerning the nature of ferments, devised the following obscure theory (Memoir by Liebig, 1870, already cited):