Scientific American Supplement, No. 643 | Page 4

to the setting up of alcoholic fermentation in a saccharine fluid. Make the presence of torul? impossible, and you exclude with certainty fermentative action.
In precisely the same way, provide a proteinaceous solution, capable of the highest putrescence, but absolutely sterilized, and placed in an optically pure or absolutely calcined air; and while these conditions are maintained, no matter what length of time may be suffered to elapse, the putrescible fluid will remain absolutely without trace of decay.
But suffer the slightest infection of the protected and pure air to take place, or, from some putrescent source, inoculate your sterilized fluid with the minutest atom, and shortly turbidity, offensive scent, and destructive putrescence ensue.
As in the alcoholic, lactic, or butyric ferments, the process set up is shown to be dependent upon and concurrent with the vegetative processes of the demonstrated organisms characterizing these ferments; so it can be shown with equal clearness and certainty that the entire process of what is known as putrescence is equally and as absolutely dependent on the vital processes of a given and discoverable series of organisms.
Now it is quite customary to treat the fermentative agency in putrefaction as if it were wholly bacterial, and, indeed, the putrefactive group of bacteria are now known as saprophytes, or saprophytic bacteria, as distinct from morphologically similar, but physiologically dissimilar, forms known as parasitic or pathogenic bacteria.
It is indeed usually and justly admitted that _B. termo_ is the exciting cause of fermentative putrefaction. Cohn has in fact contended that it is the distinctive ferment of all putrefactions, and that it is to decomposing proteinaceous solutions what _Torula cerevisi?_ is to the fermenting fluids containing sugar.
In a sense, this is no doubt strictly true: it is impossible to find a decomposing proteinaceous solution, at any stage, without finding this form in vast abundance.
But it is well to remember that in nature putrefactive ferments must go on to an extent rarely imitated or followed in the laboratory. As a rule, the pabulum in which the saprophytic organisms are provided and "cultured" is infusions, or extracts of meat carefully filtered, and, if vegetable matter is used, extracts of fruit, treated with equal care, and if needful neutralized, are used in a similar way. To these may be added all the forms of gelatine, employed in films, masses and so forth.
But in following the process of destructive fermentation as it takes place in large masses of tissue, animal or vegetable, but far preferably the former, as they lie in water at a constant temperature of from 60° to 65° F., it will be seen that the fermentative process is the work, not of one organism, nor, judging by the standard of our present knowledge, of one specified class of vegetative forms, but by organisms which, though related to each other, are in many respects greatly dissimilar, not only morphologically, but also embryologically, and even physiologically.
Moreover, although this is a matter that will want most thorough and efficient inquiry and research to understand properly its conditions, yet it is sufficiently manifest that these organisms succeed each other in a curious and even remarkable manner. Each does a part in the work of fermentative destruction; each aids in splitting up into lower and lower compounds the elements of which the masses of degrading tissue are composed; while, apparently, each set in turn does by vital action, coupled with excretion, (1) take up the substances necessary for its own growth and multiplication; (2) carry on the fermentative process; and (3) so change the immediate pabulum as to give rise to conditions suitable for its immediate successor. Now the point of special interest is that there is an apparent adaptation in the form, functions, mode of multiplication, and order of succession in these fermentative organisms, deserving study and fraught with instruction.
Let it be remembered that the aim of nature in this fermentative action is not the partial splitting of certain organic compounds, and their reconstruction in simpler conditions, but the ultimate setting free, by saprophytic action, of the elements locked up in great masses of organic tissue--the sending back into nature of the only material of which future organic structures are to be composed.
I have said that there can be no question whatever that Bacterium termo is the pioneer of saprophytes. Exclude _B. termo_ (and therefore with it all its congeners), and you can obtain no putrefaction. But wherever, in ordinary circumstances, a decomposable organic mass, say the body of a fish, or a considerable mass of the flesh of a terrestrial animal, is exposed in water at a temperature of 60° to 65° F., _B. termo_ rapidly appears, and increases with a simply astounding rapidity. It clothes the tissues like a skin, and diffuses itself throughout the fluid.
The exact chemical changes it thus effects are not at