The Life of Pasteur (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from The Life of Pasteur

Pasteur to the sure ground on which we now stand. Starting as a pure chemist, and becoming interested in the science of crystallography, it was not until his life at Lille, a town with important brewing industries, that Pasteur became interested in the biological side of chemical problems. Many years before it had been noted by qagniard-latour that yeast was composed of cells capable of reproducing themselves by a sort of budding, and he made the keen suggestion that it was possibly through some effect of their vegetation that the sugar was transformed. But Liebig's view everywhere prevailed that the ferment was an alterable, organic substance which exercised a catalytic force, transforming the sugar. It was in August, 1857, that Pasteur sent his famous paper on Lactic Acid Fermentation to the Lille Scientific Society; and in December of the same year he presented to the Academy of Sciences a paper on Alcoholic Fermentation, in which he concluded that the deduplication of sugar into alcohol and carbonic acid is cor relevant to a phenomena of life. These studies had the signal effect of diverting the man from the course of his previous more strictly chemical studies. It is interesting to note how slowly these views dislocated the dominant theories of Liebig. More than ten years after their announcement I remember that we had in our chemical lectures the catalytic theory very fully presented.

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Thus the name of Pasteur is to be found written at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the old registers of the Priory of Mouthe, in the province of Franche Comte .T he Pasteurs were ti Ders of the soil, and originally formed a sort of tribe in the small village of Reculfoz, dependent on the Priory, but they gradually dispersed over the country. The registers of Mieges, near Nozeroy, contain an entry of the marriage of Denis Pasteur and Jeanne David, dated February 9, 1682. This Denis, after whom the line of Pasteur sancestors follows in an unbroken record, lived in the village of Plenisette, where his eldest son Claude was born in 1683. Denis afterward sojourned for some time in the village of Douay, and ultimately forsaking the valley of Mieges came to Lemuy, where he worked as a miller for Claude Francois Count of Udressier, a noble descendant of a secretary of the Emperor Charles V. Lemuy is surrounded by wide plains affording pasture for herds of oxen. In the distance the pine trees of the forest of Joux stand close together, like the ranks of an immense army, their dark masses deepening the azure of the horizon. It was in those widespreading open lands that Pasteur sancestors lived. Near the church, overshadowed by old beech and lime trees, a tombstone is to be found overgrown with grass. Some members of the family lie under that slab naively inscribed :H ere lie, each by the side of the others ... In 1716, in the mill at Lemuy, ruins of which still exist, the marriage contract of Claude Pasteur was drawn up and signed in the presence of Henry Girod, Royal notary of Salins.
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