Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. FERMENTATION STUDIES. A New chapter in Pasteur's life opens with the year, 1854, when, at the age of thirty-two, he was nominated 1 the first Dean of the Faculty of Sciences, which had just been created in the industrial centre of Lille. As dean or principal of this new institution at Lille, Pasteur at once realised that its work should, to some extent, be brought in touch with one of the leading industries of the district?the manufacture of alcohol from beetroot and grain?and he therefore determined to offer courses of lectures on fermentation, and threw himself with his characteristic energy into the serious study of this subject. Thus it was that, at a time when Pasteur's mind was absorbed with the possibilities which had just been opened out to him of approaching chemical problems from an entirely novel point of view, and whilst hesitating whether he should allow himself to be carried away by a more intimate study of these fermentation processes, the choice was practically taken out of his hands, and the accident of his removal to Lille virtually decided what course his investigations should take. At this time fermentation processes were not generally regarded as vital phenomena at all, for the dominant opinion concerning them was that of Liebig, who viewed the classical transformation of sugar into alcohol as a purely chemical process, depending not upon the living yeast cells which the microscope revealed, but upon the dead yeast undergoing postmortem decomposition. I In Liebig's own words: ? Beer yeasL and, in general, all animal and vegetable matters in putrefaction impart to other bodies the state of decomposition in which they are themselves. The movement which, by the disturbed equilibrium, is impressed on their own elements, is communi...