1855—1859 83 



when he came across such feelings. One day that he had read an 

 important paper at the Academie 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 have been present, 

 who had indeed come 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 

 of. 



The election 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 internal 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 all 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 correlative to life. That special 

 lactic yeast, Pasteur could see budding, multiplying, and offer- 

 ing the same phenomena of reproduction as beer yeast. 



It was not to the Academie 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 Academie des Sciences only saw three months later. 



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