56 PASTEUR AND AFTER PASTEUR 



the quality of French beers. He had reformed the 

 making of French wines and vinegars : now, he 

 would set France equal with Germany over the 

 brewing of good beers. At Clermont, early in 

 1871, he took in hand this great business. For the 

 next five years, to the time of publication, in 1876, 

 of his tudes sur la Biere, he was at work on 

 brewing.* And, always, he was being led to those 

 later discoveries which were to be the saving not 

 of wines and beers but of legions of human and 

 animal lives. Everything else crystals and wines 

 and vinegars and silkworms and beers seems 

 hardly worth talking of, when we recall what he 

 did next for mankind. 



* According to Klocker, this part of Pasteur's work was 

 defective, in that he did not realise the harm done by " wild " 

 yeasts. This defect was remedied by Hansen's later method 

 of yeast-cultures from a single cell. " The relation between 

 Pasteur's and Hansen's work,*' says Klocker, " was clearly 

 and forcibly expressed by Delbriick in a lecture delivered in 

 Berlin in 1895 : ' Looking back on the last twenty-five years, 

 there are two great epochs marking the scientific development 

 of brewing: Pasteur's work, which was done after 1870, and 

 which is adopted in principle when we nowadays strive, by 

 the setting up of cooling vessels, to ward off external infection, 

 forms one epoch ; Hansen's, the other. But Pasteur's 

 attempts could not lead to a fruitful issue, because one link 

 was missing which was furnished by Hansen in his systematic 

 choice of pure yeast. These two men and their discoveries 

 have been the moving forces of the last decade, and have 

 brought brewing to what it is to-day.' " Klocker, On Fer- 

 mentation Organisms. Translated by Allan and Millar. 

 Longmans, 1903. Page 15. 



