1074 GAL 、or comparison,Figure348 session.ie.that of由e The issue number 21e session,inasmuch as the last page of the Compte rendu for The first appearance of theeron date.May 15th is to h of the failed to identif first appear which is near fied only ts to nde volume on Pasteur contains the (in severa date).and Mislow has it in recent article.he correct he plura),each ssue ring as an individual wm2 Monday.May 221 at the "T.XXV 于wt6 he he er. of the for the se the on page 535 (Fig.3b),and turning back to page 529 in the of in of the h 1. each issu lors qu'il et imp ible de domt which was giv the or e f the ssue,【og her with the other for of the issue.The r also volume,ete.)on page 537 of Pasteur's memoir Fig.3c). com l Chirality DOI 10.1002/chir in the singular, henceforth), and the issues were collected in the various volumes of the journal (Comptes rendus, in the plural), each issue appearing as an individual subdivi￾sion in a given volume. The first page of each issue clearly indicates the date of the session. Thus, we see in Figure 3(a) ‘‘SE´ ANCE DU LUNDI 22 MAI 1848,’’ i.e, ‘‘Session of Monday, May 22nd, 1848.’’ In addition, at the bottom of the page we see ‘‘C. R., 1848, 1er Semestre, (T. XXVI, No 21)’’. ‘‘C. R.’’ stands for Comptes rendus, ‘‘1er Semestre’’ for 1st semester, ‘‘T. XXVI’’ for Volume XXVI (T. ¼ tome, i.e., volume), ‘‘No 21’’ is the issue number, i.e., the number of the individual Compte rendu within the volume. The image in Figure 3(a) is the first page of the issue for the session at which Pasteur presented his memoir (the page number was not printed on the first page of the issues; for the page shown in Figure 3(a) the page number is 529). Therefore, the date can be readily determined for any pre￾sentation by simply turning to the first page of the issue in which the presentation appears. Pasteur’s memoir began on page 535 (Fig. 3b), and turning back to page 529 in the same issue we find (Fig. 3a) the date of the presentation, ‘‘22 Mai 1848.’’ Moreover, there are two other pieces of in￾formation in the memoir that formally link it to the date of the session (May 22nd) and rule out May 15th as the ses￾sion of the presentation. Thus, each issue (i.e., each Compte rendu) is identified with an issue number (‘‘No ’’) which was given at the bottom of the first page of the issue, together with the other information listed above. As mentioned earlier and seen on Figure 3(a), the issue num￾ber for the May 22nd, 1848, session at which Pasteur pre￾sented his memoir was 21, shown as ‘‘No 21’’ at the bottom of the first page of the issue. The issue number also appeared, sporadically, on a few additional pages of every issue. Thus, ‘‘No 21’’ did appear (together with the year, volume, etc.) on page 537 of Pasteur’s memoir (Fig. 3c). For comparison, Figure 3(d) shows the first page of the issue for the May 15th, 1848, session, i.e., that of the wrong date. The issue number, ‘‘No 20,’’ appears at the bottom. Secondly, and obviously, the page numbers of Pasteur’s memoir (535–538) also rule out the May 15th session, inasmuch as the last page of the Compte rendu for that session is 528. All of the above, then, readily, unequiv￾ocally, and clearly links Pasteur’s memoir with the May 22nd, 1848, session of the Acade´mie. All in all, therefore, it is clear that Pasteur’s memoir was presented during the May 22nd session and not on May 15th as claimed in the Œuvres. The first appearance of the erroneous date, May 15th, seems to have been in Volume 1 of the Œuvres in 1922,25 and a search of the literature failed to identify an earlier instance. However, since its first appearance the incorrect date has spread widely, at the expense of the correct date, which is nearly completely absent from the literature. In fact, efforts to locate references to the correct date identi- fied only two independent sources: Jacques Nicolle’s 1953 volume on Pasteur contains the correct date26 (in several subsequent works on Pasteur Nicolle repeated the correct date), and Mislow has it in a recent article.27 The correct Fig. 1. Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot. (Reprinted from the page on Louis Pasteur Vallery-Radot on the official website of the Acade´mie Franc¸aise (http://academie-francaise.fr/immortels/index.html). Fig. 2. First page of Pasteur’s memoir on the discovery of molecular chirality in Volume 1 of the Œuvres (p 61). Note ‘‘se´ance du 15 Mai 1848’’ (i.e., session of May 15th, 1848) in the footnote. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at www.interscience.wiley. com.] 1074 GAL Chirality DOI 10.1002/chir