After finishing this report, Pasteur went to his little vineyard on the Besançon road, where he met with a disappointment; his precious grapes had not ripened, all the strength of the plant seemed to have gone to the wood and leaves. But the grapes had their turn at the end of September and in October, those bunches that were swathed in cotton wool as well as those which had remained free under the glass; there was a great difference of colour between them, the former being very pale. Pasteur placed grapes from the two series in distinct tubes. On October 10, he compared the grapes of the glass houses, free or swathed, with the neighbouring open-air grapes. “The result was beyond my expectations; the tubes of open-air grapes fermented with grape yeast after a thirty-six or forty-eight hours’ sojourn in a stove from 25° C. to 30° C.; not one, on the contrary, of the numerous tubes of grapes swathed in cotton wool entered into alcoholic fermentation, neither did any of the tubes containing grapes ripened free under glass. It was the experiment described in my _Studies on Beer_. On the following days I repeated these experiments with the same results.” He went on to another experiment. He cut some of the swathed bunches and hung them to the vines grown in the open air, thinking that those bunches--exactly similar to those which he had found incapable of fermentation--would thus get covered with the germs of alcoholic ferments, as did the bunches grown in the open air and their wood. After that, the bunches taken from under the glass and submitted to the usual régime would ferment under the influence of the germs which they would receive as well as the others; this was exactly what happened. The difficulty now was to bring to the Académie des Sciences these branches bearing swathed bunches of grapes; in order to avoid the least contact to the grapes, these vine plants, as precious as the rarest orchids, had to be held upright all the way from Arbois to Paris. Pasteur came back to Paris in a coupé carriage on the express train, accompanied by his wife and daughter, who took it in turns to carry the vines. At last, they arrived safely at the Ecole Normale, and from the Ecole Normale to the Institute, and Pasteur had the pleasure of bringing his grapes to his colleagues as he had brought his hens. “If you crush them while in contact with pure air,” he said, “I defy you to see them ferment.” A long discussion then ensued with M. Berthelot, which was prolonged until February, 1879. “It is a characteristic of exalted minds,” wrote M. Roux, “to put passion into ideas.... For Pasteur, the alcoholic fermentation was correlative with the life of the ferment; for Bernard and M. Berthelot, it was a chemical action like any other, and could be accomplished without the participation of living cells.” “In alcoholic fermentation,” said M. Berthelot, “a soluble alcoholic ferment may be produced, which perhaps consumes itself as its production goes on.”