Two Medico-Philosophical Discourses: On Fermentation

Preface.

Indeed, when I began to look more deeply into the matter, I seemed to have found a much wider field of study. It was clearly evident that, besides those works of Art original: Artis; in this period, "Art" refers to human industry, technology, and intentional manufacturing like baking or brewing, many works of Nature produced effects that were not only similar to fermentation, but were the very same thing. I had woven together various collections of reasons and hypotheses to explain the phenomena occurring in the swelling of dough original: massæ farinaceæ, as well as the bubbling original: effervescentias of wine and other liquids. I eventually discovered that those original particles original: particulas; Willis refers to "primary particles," reflecting the 17th-century shift toward corpuscular or early atomic theory, whose excitement original: orgasmo; used here to describe the vigorous internal motion or "boiling" of atoms causes those common preparations to ferment, were also the causes of movement and change in all other mixed bodies.

Therefore, if I seem to anyone to have wandered far from my purpose, or to have gathered a too plentiful harvest of material here, I hope to be forgiven. I was led to these various and different substances by the same thread of reasoning and the close relationship between these things. Someone might object that I wrongly apply unusual notions, which are usually only heard in the workshops of chemists original: chymicorum; referring to the laboratories of alchemists and early chemists, to common tasks. To this I say that the principles I present actually carry out the automatic motions of natural things. Even to the under-