Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/250

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238
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

NATURAL PRODUCTION OF ALCOHOL.[1]

By GASTON TISSANDIER.

M. A. MÜNTZ, of the French National Agronomical Institute, announces that he has discovered traces of alcohol as a natural product in cultivated soil, rain-water, sea and river-water, and the atmosphere. He has detected the product, it is true, only in the most

Fig. 1.

infinitesimal quantities, but he has established the fact of its existence by analyses which are at once simple, clear, and convincing.

  1. Translated from "La Nature."