Bailey, defines “alcohol” as “the pure substance of anything separated from the more gross, a very fine and impalpable powder, or a very pure, well-rectified spirit.”  But, by the time of the publication of Lavoisier’s “Traite Elementaire de Chimie,” in 1789, the term “alcohol,” “alkohol,” or “alkool” (for it is spelt in all three ways), which Van Helmont had applied primarily to a fine powder, and only secondarily to spirits of wine, had lost its primary meaning altogether; and, from the end of the last century until now, it has, I believe, been used exclusively as the denotation of spirits of wine, and bodies chemically allied to that substance.

The process which gives rise to alcohol in a saccharine fluid is known to us as “fermentation;” a term based upon the apparent boiling up or “effervescence” of the fermenting liquid, and of Latin origin.

Our Teutonic cousins call the same process “gaehren,” “gaesen,” “goeschen,” and “gischen;” but, oddly enough, we do not seem to have retained their verb or their substantive denoting the action itself, though we do use names identical with, or plainly derived from, theirs for the scum and lees.  These are called, in Low German, “gaescht” and “gischt;” in Anglo-Saxon, “gest,” “gist,” and “yst,” whence our “yeast.”  Again, in Low German and in Anglo-Saxon, there is another name for yeast, having the form “barm,” or “beorm;” and, in the Midland Counties, “barm” is the name by which yeast is still best known.  In High German, there is a third name for yeast, “hefe,” which is not represented in English, so far as I know.

All these words are said by philologers to be derived from roots expressive of the intestine motion of a fermenting substance.  Thus “hefe” is derived from “heben,” to raise; “barm” from “beren” or “baeren,” to bear up; “yeast,” “yst,” and “gist,” have all to do with seething and foam, with “yeasty waves,” and “gusty” breezes.

The same reference to the swelling up of the fermenting substance is seen in the Gallo-Latin terms “levure” and “leaven.”

It is highly creditable to the ingenuity of our ancestors that the peculiar property of fermented liquids, in virtue of which they “make glad the heart of man,” seems to have been known in the remotest periods of which we have any record.  All savages take to alcoholic fluids as if they were to the manner born.  Our Vedic forefathers intoxicated themselves with the juice of the “soma;” Noah, by a not unnatural reaction against a superfluity of water, appears to have taken the earliest practicable opportunity of qualifying that which he was obliged to drink; and the ghosts of the ancient Egyptians were solaced by pictures of banquets in which the winecup passes round, graven on the walls of their tombs.  A knowledge of the process of fermentation, therefore, was in all probability possessed by the prehistoric populations of the globe; and it must have become a matter of great interest even to primaeval wine-bibbers