The life of Pasteur / tr. from the French by Mrs. R.L. Devonshire.

  • Vallery-Radot, René, 1853-1933.
Date:
1914
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The life of Pasteur / tr. from the French by Mrs. R.L. Devonshire. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    when he came across such feelings. One day that he had read an important paper at the Académie des Sciences, “ Would you believe it,” he wrote to his father, “ I met a Paris Professor of chemistry the very next day, whom I know to hâve been présent, who had indeed corne purposely to hear my reading, and he never said a word ! I then remembered a saying of M. Biot’s : ' When a colleague reads a paper and no one speaks to him about it afterwards, it is because it has been thought well [ le Ci Ü *\ *1 tii' The élection was at hand. Pasteur wrote (March 11) : “ My dear father, I am certain to fail.” He thought he might count upon twenty votes ; thirty were necessary. He resigned himself philosophically. His candidature would at any rate bring his works into greater prominence. In spite of a splendid report by Senarmont, enumerating the successive steps by which Pasteur had risen since his first discoveries concerning the connection between internai structure and external crystalline forms, Pasteur only obtained sixteen votes. On his return to Lille he set to work with renewed energy ; he took up again his study of fermentations, and in particular that of sour milk, called lactic fermentation ; he made notes of his experiments day by day ; he drew in a notebook the little globules, the tiny bodies that he found in a grey substance sometimes aranged in a zone. Those globules, much smaller than those of yeast, had escaped the observation of chemists and naturalists because it was easy to confound them with other products of lactic fermentation. After isolating and then scattering in a liquid a trace of that grey substance, Pasteur saw some well-characterized lactic fermentation appear. That matter, that grey substance was indeed the ferment. Whilst ail the writings of the chemists who followed in the train of Liebig and Berzelius united in rejecting the idea of an influence of life in the cause of fermentations, Pasteur recog- nized therein a phenomenon corrélative to life. That spécial lactic yeast, Pasteur could see budding, multiplying, and offer- ing the same phenomena of reproduction as beer yeast. It was not to the Académie des Sciences, as is generally believed, that Pasteur sent the paper on lactic fermentation, the fifteen pages of which contained such curious and unexpected facts. With much delicacy of feeling, Pasteur made to the Lille Scientific Society this communication (August, 1857) which the Académie des Sciences only saw three months later. o, 2