Louis Pasteur : his life and labours / by his son-in-law ; tr. from the French by Lady Claud Hamilton ; with an introduction by John Tyndall.

  • Vallery-Radot, René, 1853-1933.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Louis Pasteur : his life and labours / by his son-in-law ; tr. from the French by Lady Claud Hamilton ; with an introduction by John Tyndall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    Under this head are also rightly ranked the phe- nomena of putrefaction. As M. Eadot well expresses it, the fermentation of sugar may be described as the putrefaction of sugar. In this particular field M. Pasteur, whose contributions to the subject are of the highest value, was preceded by Schwann, a man of great merit, of whom the world has heard too little.' Schwann placed decoctions of meat in flasks, sterilised the decoctions by boiling, and then supplied them with calcined air, the power of which to support life he showed to be unimpaired. Under these cu-cumstances putrefaction never set in. Hence the conclusion of Schwann, that putrefaction was not due to the contact of air, as affirmed by Gay-Lussac, but to something suspended in the air which heat was able to destro}'. This something consists of living organisms which nourish themselves at the expense of the organic substance, and cause its putrefaction. The grasp of Pastern- on this class of subjects was embracing. He studied acetic fermentation, and found it to be the work of a minute fungus, the my- coderma aceti, which, requiring free oxygen for its nutrition, overspreads the surface of the fermenting liquid. By the alcoholic ferment the sugar of the grape-juice is transformed into carbonic acid gas and ' It was late in the day when the Eoyal Society made him a foreign member.