“There seems to be no doubt as to the part which the vegetable organism plays in the phenomenon of fermentation.  It is through it alone that an albuminous substance and sugar are enabled to unite and form this particular combination, this unstable form under which alone, as a component part of the mycoderm, they manifest an action on sugar.  Should the mycoderm cease to grow, the bond which unites the constituent parts of the cellular contents is loosened, and it is through the motion produced therein that the cells of yeast bring about a disarrangement or separation of the elements of the sugar into molecules.”

One might easily believe that the translator for the Annales has made some mistake, so great is the obscurity of this passage.

Whether we take this new form of the theory or the old one, neither can be reconciled at all with the development of yeast and fermentation in a saccharine mineral medium, for in the latter experiment fermentation is correlative to the life of the ferment and to its nutrition, a constant change going on between the ferment and its food-matters, since all the carbon assimilated by the ferment is derived from sugar, its nitrogen from ammonia and phosphorus from the phosphates in solution.  And even all said, what purpose can be served by the gratuitous hypothesis of contact-action or communicated motion?  The experiment of which we are speaking is thus a fundamental one; indeed, it is its possibility that constitutes the most effective point in the controversy.  No doubt Liebig might say, “but it is the motion of life and of nutrition which constitutes your experiment, and this is the communicated motion that my theory requires.”  Curiously enough, Liebig does endeavour, as a matter of fact, to say this, but he does so timidly and incidentally:  “From a chemical point of view, which point of view I would not willingly abandon, a vital action is a phenomenon of motion, and, in this double sense of life M. Pasteur’s theory agrees with my own, and is not in contradiction with it (page 6).”  This is true.  Elsewhere Liebig says: 

“It is possible that the only correlation between the physiological act and the phenomenon of fermentation is the production, in the living cell, of the substance which, by some special property analogous to that by which emulsin exerts a decomposing action on salicin and amygdalin, may bring about the decomposition of sugar into other organic molecules; the physiological act, in this view, would be necessary for the production of this substance, but would have nothing else to do with the fermentation (page 10).”  To this, again, we have no objection to raise.