THIS THEME should exclude the production of undesirable flavours in the course of spoilage, but I shall not regard myself as too strictly bound by such limitation in these preliminary remarks. The microbiological processes are similar whether the changes are desirable or undesirable, and the distinction between the two may be very difficult to draw; for example, the vintage buried eggs beloved of the Chinese are said to be unattractive to European taste, and opinions are even apt to differ over the exact point at which a Camembert cheese passes from the good to the bad.The basic tastes perceptible to the human tongue are regarded as restricted to four simple ones: sour (acid), bitter, sweet and salty. In creating a flavour, however, these primary taste sensations are critically supplemented by a large number and variety of odour perceptions, registered by the olfactory apparatus. The flavours which we nowadays regard as desirable are comparatively sophisticated ; in a commercial world, it does not suffice to have simply cheese or beer, it must be good and reliable cheese or beer, with distinctive pocularities likely to give the individual product an advantage over similar articles in a highly competitive market. This means that our theme is concerned essentially with the more subtle aspects of flavour-i.e. the volatile odoriferous constituents ; and it is because these are often produced by micro-organisms that we have a special interest in the subject.With thi$ preamble, I embark upon the theme proper, dividing the development of a desirable flavour in a food into five arbitrary stages, which for convenience can be called respectively the primitive, the traditional, the analytical, the empirical and the synthetic.The beginning of the primitive stage is lost in antiquity ; when, maybe, a commonly occurring accidental spoilage gradually came to be regarded as acceptable through the frequent necessity of consuming the spoiled material or starving. Age old practices like the production of beer or wine, or the preservation of milk by the lactic acid fermentation, could well have originated in this way, in circumstances where the raw ingredients were almost impossible to preserve in the fresh state. Doubtless too, the results were haphazard, sometimes acceptable and sometimes not. The causes were certainly unknown; there are, for instance, plenty of references in classical mythology to states of intoxication, induced deliberately or otherwise, being regarded as possession by a god; and the notion that milk was soured by pixies, not streptococci, persisted almost to the present day.A