Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/246

236 old gentleman was disconcerted, and declared it was his business to question the pupil, not Pasteur's to question him. Pasteur then had recourse to a pharmacist in the town who had gained some distinction in science, and took private lessons in chemistry from him. He fared better at the École Normale, where he had Balard for a teacher, and also enjoyed the instructions of Dumas, with whom he formed a life-long friendship at the Sorbonne.

Pasteur's first important investigation was suggested at about this time, by an observation of Mitscherlich, the German mineralogist, of a difference in the behavior toward polarized light of the crystals of paratartrate of soda and ammonia and tartrate of soda and ammonia, bodies identical in composition and external form and other properties. Pasteur discovered differences in the form of the crystals and the molecular structure of the two bodies that had escaped detection, and was led to consider that all things may be divided into two categories: those having a plane of symmetry—that is, capable of being divided so that the parts on either side of the plane of division shall be equal and identical—or symmetrical bodies; and dissymmetrical bodies, or those not capable of being so divided. Occupied with the idea that symmetry or dissymmetry in the molecular arrangement of any chemical substance must be manifested in all its properties capable of showing the quality, he pursued his investigations till he reached the conclusion that an essential difference in properties as to symmetry exists between mineral and dead matter and matter in which life is in course of development, the former being symmetrical, the latter unsymmetrical.

Pasteur's wedding-day came on while he was engaged in this investigation. He went, not to the marriage-feast, but to his laboratory, and had to be sent for when all was ready.

With his observing powers quickened by his studies of symmetry and dissymmetry, Pasteur went to the researches with which his life has been identified, beginning with his studies in fermentation. Liebig's theory, that fermentation is a change undergone by nitrogenous substances under the influence of the oxygen of the air, ruled at the time, and the observations of Schwann and Cagniard-Latour on the yeast-plant were overlooked or regarded as exceptional. M. Pasteur continued the investigation of the alcohol-producing yeast-plant, and, cultivating it in suitable solutions, proved that it possessed organizing power ample to account for the phenomena. He found a similar organism—minute cells or articulations narrowly contracted in the middle—active in the lactic fermentation, capable of cultivation; and another organism, a vibrion, full of motion, living singly or in chains, working in the butyric fermentation.

The butyric vibrion was found to work quite as vigorously and with as much effect when no air was added to the decoctions, and in fact to perish with a stoppage of the formation of butyric acid when air was