PASTEUR, Louis.

Paris, 1857. 4to. (4),+ 909-40 pp. Bound together with: PASTEUR, Louis. Noveaux faits pour servir à l’histoire de la levûre lactique. In: Compte rendu des séances de l’Académie des Sciences. Séance du Lundi 14 Février 1859. Paris, 1859. 4to. (2),+ 303-50 pp. Later blue half morocco. With the Bookplate of Nils Fries. Pasteur’s articles make up pp. 913-16 and 337-38 respectively. Garrison & Morton 2 ed. 2472-2473. Heralds of Science, 198. ”Pasteur’s commencement of the study of fermentation. In the 1850’s Louis Pasteur set out to challenge the dominant view that fermentation was caused by a chemical reaction where sugar was transformed into alcohol and carbon dioxide. The ”Mémoire sur la fermentation appelée lactique” was the opening salvo. This first publication is an abridged version of the fifteen page essay which was published the following year in ”Mémoires de la Société des Sciences, de l'Agriculture et des Arts de Lille” and ”Annales de Chimie et de Physique”Gerald L. Geison writes in ”Dictionary of Scientific Biography”: ”Emile Duclaux has suggested that two factors induced Pasteur to focus first on the relatively unimportant lactic fermentation (most familiar as the process producing sour milk) rather than alcoholic fermentation: (1) a large quantity of amyl alcohol is produced during lactic fermentation and (2) alcoholic fermentation had already been thoroughly investigated without seriously threatening the dominant chemical theory. In a sense, unless and until living organisms were implicated in other fermentations, advocates of the chemical theory could continue to doubt the essential role of living yeast in alcoholic fermentation. […] Pasteur’s memoir expressed the basic approach and point of view which informed all of his subsequent work on fermentation.” Pasteur makes the claim that “just as an alcoholic ferment exists–namely, brewer’s yeast–which is found wherever sugar breaks down into alcohol and carbonic acid–so too there is a special ferment–a lactic yeast–always present when sugar becomes lactic acid.” ”Throughout the memoir”, Geison continues ”Pasteur more nearly assumed than proved that lactic yeast “is a living organism,…that its chemical action on sugar corresponds to its development and organization,”