Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 81.djvu/13

Rh is necessary to fix contemporary events more definitely I may introduce the fact that two years later Pasteur quotes Professor Biot as referring to his recent discoveries in crystallography as "a very California."

Now, this work of Pasteur on the tartaric acids not only opened a new field in crystallographic studies, hut, of far greater importance, led to the discoverer's studies in fermentation. In the course of his work on the tartaric acids he found that if salts of the inactive acid were acted upon by a mould (Penicilium glaucum) the right-handed constituent was destroyed, but the left-handed remained unchanged; and from this he concluded that the change from an optically inactive to an optically active fluid, under such experimental conditions, could be due only to the presence of living matter causing the destruction of one component. This was the beginning of his studies of fermentation, and from this time his labors were those which eventually established the sciences of bacteriology and immunity.

The opportunity to study alcoholic fermentation came at Lille in 1854, at a time when Pasteur was professor of chemistry and dean to the faculty at that place. The manufacturers of the region had met with disappointment in the making of alcohol from beets, and one of them came to the new professor of chemistry for advice. Pasteur undertook daily visits to the factory and from these visits came the idea of studying the fermenting beet juice in the laboratory.

Fermentation, at the time Pasteur entered the field, was a subject involved in great obscurity, with only here and there a ray of light. Cagnaird-Latour, in 1836, had studied that ferment of beer called yeast, and had observed that it was composed of cells "susceptible of reproduction by a sort of budding, and probably acting on sugar through some effect of their vegetation." Schwann and Kützing a few years later reached the same conclusion, but were opposed at once by Liebig, who enunciated a theory of mechanical decomposition and denied in its entirety the theory that fermentation was a biological process. Also Berzelius, second only to Liebig as an authority, believed fermentation was due to contact, and elaborated a theory of catalytic force. With such weighty opposing opinion the observations of Cagnaird-Latour and Kützing were neglected and fermentation was regarded by all as a strange and obscure process and was so characterized by Claude Bernard in 1850.

Uninfluenced by these views, however, Pasteur, having recognized that living matter is essential for alcoholic fermentation, adhered strictly to the experimental method, and taking up the problem of lactic acid fermentation (the souring of milk), discovered that the same budding and multiplying of a cell went on in it as in alcoholic fermentation, but that the cell of lactic acid fermentation was different from that of alcoholic fermentation. He observed also that the form of the