Page 80 - Ethel D. Hume - Bešam ili Paster: Izgubljeno poglavlje u istoriji biologije

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RIVAL THEORIES AND WORKERS 77

scarcely in his favour. To quote, for instance, from one of
1
his eulogists in the article on 'Fermentation, 5 9 by Julian
Levett Baker, F.I.G., in the Encyclopedia Britannica, we
1
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read: "According to Pasteur . . . 'fermentation is life
without air, or life without oxygen.' This theory of fer-
mentation was materially modified in 1892 and 1894 by
A. J. Brown who described experiments which were in
disagreement with Pasteur's dictum."
Pasteur himself, in controversies both with M. Trecul
and with the Turin Commission, which investigated his
prophylaxis for anthrax, was forced to admit that an-
aerobics could gradually be induced to live with air with-
out becoming ferments and that aerobics could become
ferments. Thus he himself destroyed his own classification.
Yet this untenable description was Pasteur's chief support
for his later equally untenable claim that he had been the
first to regard fermentation as a phenomenon of nutrition
and of assimilation. In a statement of his made in 1872
and repeated in his Etudes sur la Biire, we find quite
contrary teaching 2 :
"That which separates the chemical phenomenon of
fermentation from a crowd of other acts and especially from
the acts of ordinary life is the fact of the decomposition of a
weight offermentative matter much superior to the weight
of the ferment."
What more inevitable act of "ordinary life" could there
be than that of nutrition and digestion from which the
famous chemist thus separated the phenomenon of fer-
mentation? Pasteur was here only appropriating the same
singular idea of physiology that had already been voiced
in 1865 by a follower of his, M. Duclaux:
3
"When in our alcoholic fermentation we see a certain
weight of sugar transformed into alcohol by a weight of
yeast one hundred, nay, a thousand times smaller, it is
very difficult to believe that this sugar made at any time
1
Eleventh Edition.
2
Comptes Rendus de VAcadimie des Sciences 75, p. 785 (1872).
3
Annates Scientiques de UJicole Normale, 2, p. 249 (1865).