The reports of the Académie des Sciences for 1858 show how Pasteur recognized complex phenomena in alcoholic fermentation. Whilst chemists were content to say: “So much sugar gives so much alcohol and so much carbonic acid,” Pasteur went further. He wrote to Chappuis in June: “I find that alcoholic fermentation is constantly accompanied by the production of glycerine; it is a very curious fact. For instance, in one litre of wine there are several grammes of that product which had not been suspected.” Shortly before that he had also recognized the normal presence in alcoholic fermentation of succinic acid. “I should be pursuing the consequences of these facts,” he added, “if a temperature of 36° C. did not keep me from my laboratory. I regret to see the longest days in the year lost to me. Yet I have grown accustomed to my attic, and I should be sorry to leave it. Next holidays I hope to enlarge it. You too are struggling against material hindrances in your work; let it stimulate us, my dear fellow, and not discourage us. Our discoveries will have the greater merit.” The year 1859 was given up to examining further facts concerning fermentation. Whence came those ferments, those microscopic bodies, those transforming agents, so weak in appearance, so powerful in reality? Great problems were working in his mind; but he was careful not to propound them hastily, for he was the most timid, the most hesitating of men until he held proofs in his hands. “In experimental science,” he wrote, “it is always a mistake not to doubt when facts do not compel you to affirm.” In September he lost his eldest daughter. She died of typhoid fever at Arbois, where she was staying with her grandfather. On December 30 Pasteur wrote to his father: “I cannot keep my thoughts from my poor little girl, so good, so happy in her little life, whom this fatal year now ending has taken away from us. She was growing to be such a companion to her mother and to me, to us all.... But forgive me, dearest father, for recalling these sad memories. She is happy; let us think of those who remain and try as much as lies in our power to keep from them the bitterness of this life.” CHAPTER V 1860--1864 On January 30, 1860, the Académie des Sciences conferred on Pasteur the Prize for Experimental Physiology. Claude Bernard, who drew up the report, recalled how much Pasteur’s experiments in alcoholic fermentation, lactic fermentation, the fermentation of tartaric acid, had been appreciated by the Académie. He dwelt upon the great physiological interest of the results obtained. “It is,” he concluded, “by reason of that physiological tendency in Pasteur’s researches, that the Commission has unanimously selected him for the 1859 Prize for Experimental Physiology.”