In this beautiful work, and in all subsequent ones of which the ripening of fruits has been the subject, two facts of great theoretical value have escaped the notice of the authors; these are the two facts which Messrs. Lechartier and Bellamy pointed out for the first time, namely, the production of alcohol and the absence of cells of ferments.  It is worthy of remark that these two facts, as we have shown above, were actually fore-shadowed in the theory of fermentation that we advocated as far back as 1861, and we are happy to add that Messrs. Lechartier and Bellamy, who at first had prudently drawn no theoretical conclusions from their work, now entirely agree with the theory we have advanced. [Footnote:  Those gentlemen express themselves thus:  “In a note presented to the Academy in November, 1872, we published certain experiments which showed that carbonic acid and alcohol may be produced in fruits kept in a closed vessel, out of contact with atmospheric oxygen, without our being able to discover alcoholic ferment in the interior of those fruits.

“M.  Pasteur, as a logical deduction from the principle which he has established in connection with the theory of fermentation, considers that the formation of alcohol may be attributed to the fact that the physical and chemical precesses of life in the cells of fruit continue under new conditions, in A manner similar to those of the cells of ferment.  Experiments, continued during 1872, 1873, and 1874, on different fruits have furnished results all of which seem to us to harmonize with this proposition, and to establish it on a firm basis of proof.”—­Comptes rendus, t. lxxix., p. 949, 1874.] Their mode of reasoning is very different from that of the savants with whom we discussed the subject before the Academy, on the occasion when the communication which we addressed to the Academy in October, 1872, attracted attention once more to the remarkable observations of Messrs. Lechartier and Bellamy. [Footnote:  Pasteur, Faites nouveaux pour servir a la connaissance de la theorie des fermentations proprement dites.  (Comptes rendus de l’Academie des Sciences, t. lxxv., p. 784.) See in the same volume the discussion that followed; also, Pasteur, Note sur la production de l’alcool par les fruits, same volume, p. 1054, in which we recount the observations anterior to our own, made by Messrs. Lechartier and Bellamy in 1869.] M. Fremy, in particular, was desirous of finding in these observations a confirmation of his views on the subject of hemi-organism, and a condemnation of ours, notwithstanding the fact that the preceding explanations, and, more particularly our Note of 1861, quoted word for word in the preceding section, furnish