sources of life, before this phenomenon which endows
with a new existence the organic atoms which death has
just dissociated and liberated? There is no death, said
the believers in this doctrine. When an animal dies,
the life of the whole vanishes but not the life of the
elements, not that of its ultimate molecules. Scarcely
are they set at liberty by death, than they at once begin
an independent life, become isolated, and then give birth
to vibrios, to monads, or else they join already formed
aggregations which attract them, and thus produce the
large Infusoria. "Therefore," said Buffon, "it is in-
evitable that one should encounter all imaginable grada-
tions in this chain of organisms which descends from
the most completely organized animal to the simple
organic molecule."

We see the connection between these ideas and those
which during the same epoch explained the mystery of
fermentations. It was the same organic molecules,
dissociated by putrefaction, which provoked the decom-
position of fermentable substances by communicating
to them their own movement, and which, on the other
hand, became organized into living animalculæ. Sin-
gularly, this idea of a common origin did not prevent the
fermentation of a liquor from being considered as some-
thing quite independent of the Infusoria which might
appear therein, and these two kinds of evolution of the
organic molecule were even regarded as opposed to each
other, and the Infusoria as harmful to the fermentation
which was called the principal phenomenon.

What a strange way of looking at things! we might say
to-day. Why turn the carpet over in order to see the
design? When we know a little of the history of science,
we are no longer astonished at this kind of blindness.
Our conceptions of things are generally more compli-
cated than the things themselves. It is rare that the

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