These are the different kinds of fermentation and
decay of living substances. It needs, for
example, life in the air to turn milk sour.

Last year a French chemist, M. Pasteur, made
some experiments, which, though directed
specially to the investigation of the nature of
fermentation, have so much relation to the subject
we are now considering, and show besides so
clearly the almost infinite diffusion and powers
of the vital principle, that a short detail of the
facts discovered will be interesting.

When air was sucked through glass tubes,
plugged with gun cotton for some time, and the
cotton thus charged with the organised particles
supposed to exist in the atmosphere, was
dissolved in ether, it left behind a small quantity
of an organic substance which, when patiently
examined by powerful microscopes, disclosed
the existence of many minute organisms, animal
and vegetable infusoria, &c. These exist among
the motes which we see floating in a sunbeam.

Now, when a fermentable solution was boiled,
in order to destroy all germs of life that might
exist therein, and only allowed to remain in
contact with air that had been passed through
red-hot platinum tubes, though placed in the
most favourable circumstances for its fermentation,
it underwent no change. Even after many
weeks, though under ordinary circumstances
such a mixture would not keep three days, there
was no change. But when (still keeping the
solution under the same conditions) a small plug
of cotton or asbestos, charged with the "air-
dust" above mentioned, was allowed to fall in
the mixture, after a few hours the whole began
to grow turbid, the yeast plants made their
appearance, and the mixture became charged with
animal life, exhibiting, in fact, all the phenomena
of fermentation.

When a similar experiment was made with
milk— which we know will not long remain
sweet under ordinary circumstances— it
remained uncurdled and pure for any length of
time, until the germs of life obtained from the
atmosphere were placed in it, then it quickly
curdled and went sour, with all the appearances
of milk spoilt with keeping.

With so much life in the air, we must breathe
it, and every living sound we hear must vibrate
through a world of life into our ears. It is
everywhere, within us and about us, yet we
cannot, even by the utmost flight of imagination,
know more of what it is than that it is a precious
gift of the All-Wise.

A TERRIBLE OLD LADY.

Consulting the pleasant stores of the
Honourable Horace Walpole, Lord Hervey, Sir
Nathanial Wraxall, Baronet, and other
repertories of light and agreeable scandal— scandal,
as it were, deodorised and prepared specially
for the drawing-room— we are pretty sure to
meet the spectres of very many terrible old
ladies. Such old ladies must of necessity be
an element of every fashionable society; and
in its ranks are sure to be encountered, some
fearful stragglers and veteran anacronisms,
whose place is with that grand army who passed
by, years ago. The presence of those
"remains in the drift"— upon the sofa— that
aggregate of sham hair, sham teeth, sham bloom,
sham plumpness, and sham smiles— is salutary.
These are the terrible old ladies of society—
terrible because they fill us with awe and fear.
The most terrible of all terrible old ladies, who
stands out from the herd with a conspicuousness
that renders competition hopeless, came
into the world exactly two hundred and ten
years ago, and after filling up nearly seventy-two
years of scandal and intrigue, died in the odour
of sanctity about the year seventeen hundred
and twenty-two. She was Madame Charlotte
Elizabeth, of Bavaria, daughter of the Elector
Palatine, and married to the brother of the Great
Louis. She was therefore mother to the famous
Regent Orleans, who consequently took his
rather free manners and general coarseness of
speech by a sort of inheritance.

In her old age this terrible old lady used to
correspond very largely with her German friends
and relations; and from the heart of the French
court poured forth strange budgets of gossip,
coarse slanders, and piquant details of court life.
A German lady of quality carefully collected
those despatches, and put them aside, until by
some accident they were brought to light, and it
was determined to publish them.

It was a matter of considerable delicacy,
dealing with these letters of the terrible old
lady. They were so dreadfully plain-spoken,
and called a spade a spade with such loud
emphasis, that it was clear they could not be
presented to the public in their natural state. On
the other hand, it was scarcely respect to the
departed dead to be thus tampering with her
remains: and the good was so intimately
associated with the bad, that the task of separation
became one of extreme nicety. The editor
grapples with the difficulty very ingeniously: "Far,"
lie says, "from taking the liberty of altering
ideas and expressions, under the idle pretext of
a false delicacy, I have endeavoured to retain as
much as possible that originality or preciseness
of style which is, as it were, the physiognomy of
wit. Anything that did not bear submitting to
the public gaze I was not so presumptuous as
to alter or soften. I simply suppressed it
altogether— the only possible way of conciliating
the respect due to the public with the respect
due to truth."

This programme reads handsomely, and ought
certainly to be a guarantee for the susceptibility
of the public not being wounded. Yet when we
look at the amount of strange and questionable
matter that remains after this disinfecting
process, we are confounded to find that either the
respect due to "truth and to the public" has
not been exactly "conciliated:" or that the
public to whom they were presented had a lower
standard of respect than our own, which is not
improbable.

From these letters, infinitely entertaining,
from their communicativeness and fulness of