There will be produced once more the gases, which this
time will have an odor, because in this reducing medium,
hydrogen is mixed with sulphuretted and phosphoretted
hydrogen, which are not formed in contact with air,
or, if formed, are oxidized immediately: we shall have,
therefore, a putrid odor. But the gases will have the
same origin as in the fermentation of lactate of lime.
Fermentation and putrefaction are synonymous terms,
and there is no reason for maintaining the old distinction,
which had not yet disappeared from the conclusions of
Helmholtz. In these two phenomena the liberation of
gases has the same origin, and it is due to organisms
living in the absence of air. It is opportune to ask
if there is not a close relation between the phenomena
of fermentation and of anaërobic life. Here we have a
great question which Pasteur put to himself immediately,
but which he did not solve until some years after.

I have thought best to present without detailed exami-
nation all these deductions, because in reality they were
the work of some weeks of labor and meditation, and
also because we have in them an example of Pasteur's
insight, of his ability to discover and state a problem,
of the patience with which he gathered together the
elements of the solution. During the best years of his
life, this man lived in advance of his time, a pioneer lost
in the solitude, absorbed in the contemplation of the
vistas which he was discovering, and which his eye alone
was to scrutinize and survey. What less astonishing
than his apparent indifference to things of daily life!
He lived in his thoughts without being a dreamer, for a
dream which goes somewhere and which bears fruit is no
longer a dream.

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