to say, from the potential chemical energy of the compounds which form its medium of culture,—we then find ourselves in the worst possible situation for the recognition of organic destruction. Further, it is doubly wrong to assert that in so ill-chosen a type the functional phenomena do not result from an organic destruction—for at first there are no very distinct functional phenomena here—and, in the second place, there certainly is organic destruction. The phenomena of the morphogenic vitality detected in the yeast are the exact concomitants, or the results, of the destruction of an organic compound, which in this case is sugar. The yeast destroys an immediate principle, and this is the point of departure of its vital manifestations; only, it has not, as a preliminary, clearly incorporated and assimilated this principle. When, therefore, the functional phenomena are effaced and disappear, we none the less find phenomena of destruction of organic compounds which are in a measure, a preface to the phenomena of growth. This is what happens in the case of brewers' yeast: and here, again, the two categories of facts exist. Once more, we find, in the first place, the phenomena of destruction (destruction of sugar, reduced by simplification to alcohol and carbonic acid)—phenomena which this time no longer respond to obvious functional manifestations; and, in the second place, the phenomena of chemical and organogenic synthesis, corresponding to the growth of the yeast and the multiplication of its protoplasm. The former are no longer detected, as we have just said, by striking manifestations. However, it is not true that everything which is visible and which may be isolated outside the activity of the yeast is part of those
