vincingly traces out the whole process. The normal plant obtains its food from inorganic material. But when opportunity offers it easily lapses into a condition in which it takes the material for metabolism ready made from the decay of others and becomes saprophytic. Ward shows that it is only a step to the attack on the living, and for the saprophyte to become a parasite, and he further shows that it can be readily educated to be so. He does not hesitate to suggest that the function of conidia in the complicated cycle of fungal reproduction is to form the cellulose-dissolving ferment. But now and again the host does not succumb to its invader. A truce is sometimes called in the struggle, and host and parasite are content to live together in a mutually advantageous symbiosis or commensalism.
Three years earlier, in 1887, Ward's attention had been drawn by a happy accident to the physiological aspect of symbiosis, and it never ceased to occupy his mind. It was well known that ginger-beer was made in villages in stone bottles. The fermentation was effected by the so-called "ginger-beer plant" which was passed on from family to family, but nothing was known as to how or where it originated. It seemed to have some analogy with the Kephir of the Caucasus. A specimen was sent to me from the Eastern Counties, and it stood for some time in the sun in my study. I noticed the vigorous growth accompanied by a copious evolution of gas. Ward coming to see me one day, I handed it over to him as a problem worth his attention. At the same time Prof. Bayley Balfour had examined it and concluded that it was a mixture of a yeast and a bacterium. Its study involved Ward in a very laborious research which occupied him for some years, and of which the results were published in the Phil. Trans. in 1892. It proved to be a mixture of very various organisms, every one of which Ward exhaustively studied. This required not less than 2000 separate cultures. The essential components proved to be, as Balfour had suggested, a yeast derived from the sugar and a bacterium from the ginger. Both were anaërobic; the yeast fermented cane-sugar with the copious production of carbon dioxide but little alcohol; the bacterium also produced carbon dioxide, even in a vacuum tube.
