Excerpt from The Life of Pasteur, Vol. 1 Pasteur to the sure ground on which we now stand. Startingn 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 cagniard-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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.