That same January, Pasteur wrote to Chappuis: “I am pursuing as best I can these studies on fermentation which are of great interest, connected as they are with the impenetrable mystery of Life and Death. I am hoping to mark a decisive step very soon by solving, without the least confusion, the celebrated6 question of spontaneous generation. Already I could speak, but I want to push my experiments yet further. There is so much obscurity, together with so much passion, on both sides, that I shall require the accuracy of an arithmetical problem to convince my opponents by my conclusions. I intend to attain7 even that.”
“I think I told you that I should read a second and last lecture on my old researches on Friday, at the Chemical Society, before several members of the Institute—amongst others, Messrs. Dumas and Claude Bernard. That lecture has had the same success as the first. M. Biot heard about it the next day through some distinguished10 persons who were in the audience, and sent for me in order to kindly11 express his great satisfaction.
“After I had finished, M. Dumas, who occupied the chair,{88} rose and addressed me in these words. After praising the zeal12 I had brought to this novel kind of teaching at the Society’s request, and the so great penetration13 I had given proof of, in the course of the work I had just expounded14, he added, ‘The Académie, sir, rewarded you a few days ago for other profound researches; your audience of this evening will applaud you as one of the most distinguished professors we possess.’
“All I have underlined was said in those very words by M. Dumas, and was followed by great applause.
“All the students of the scientific section of the Ecole Normale were present; they felt deeply moved and several of them have expressed their emotion to me.
“As for myself, I saw the realization15 of what I had foreseen. You know how I have always told you confidentially16 that time would see the growth of my researches on the molecular17 dissymmetry of natural organic products. Founded as they were on varied18 notions borrowed from divers19 branches of science—crystallography, physics, and chemistry—those studies could not be followed by most scientists so as to be fully20 understood. On this occasion I presented them in the aggregate21 with some clearness and power and every one was struck by their importance.
“It is not by their form that these two lectures have delighted my hearers, it is by their contents; it is the future reserved to those great results, so unexpected, and opening such entirely22 new vistas23 to physiology. I have dared to say so, for at these heights all sense of personality disappears, and there only remains24 that sense of dignity which is ever inspired by true love of science.
“God grant that by my persevering26 labours I may bring a little stone to the frail27 and ill-assured edifice28 of our knowledge of those deep mysteries of Life and Death where all our intellects have so lamentably29 failed.
“P.S.—Yesterday I presented to the Academy my researches on spontaneous generation; they seemed to produce a great sensation. More later.”
When Biot heard that Pasteur wished to tackle this study of spontaneous generation, he interposed, as he had done seven years before, to arrest him on the verge30 of his audacious experiments on the part played by dissymmetrical forces in the development of life. Vainly Pasteur, grieved at Biot’s disapprobation, explained that this question, in the course of{89} such researches, had become an imperious necessity; Biot would not be convinced. But Pasteur, in spite of his quasi-filial attachment31 to Biot, could not stop where he was; he had to go through to the end.
“You will never find your way out,” cried Biot.
“I shall try,” said Pasteur modestly.
Angry and anxious, Biot wished Pasteur to promise that he would relinquish32 these apparently33 hopeless researches. J. B. Dumas, to whom Pasteur related the more than discouraging remonstrances34 of Biot, entrenched35 himself behind this cautious phrase—
“I would advise no one to dwell too long on such a subject.”
Senarmont alone, full of confidence in the ingenious curiosity of the man who could read nature by dint36 of patience, said that Pasteur should be allowed his own way.
It is regrettable that Biot—whose passion for reading was so indefatigable37 that he complained of not finding enough books in the library at the Institute—should not have thought of writing the history of this question of spontaneous generation. He could have gone back to Aristotle, quoted Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Pliny. Philosophers, poets, naturalists38, all believed in spontaneous generation. Time went on, and it was still believed in. In the sixteenth century, Van Helmont—who should not be judged by that one instance—gave a celebrated recipe to create mice: any one could work that prodigy39 by putting some dirty linen40 in a receptacle, together with a few grains of wheat or a piece of cheese. Some time later an Italian, Buonanni, announced a fact no less fantastic: certain timberwood, he said, after rotting in the sea, produced worms which engendered41 butterflies, and those butterflies became birds.
Another Italian, less credulous42, a poet and a physician, Francesco Redi, belonging to a learned society calling itself The Academy of Experience, resolved to carefully study one of those supposed phenomena43 of spontaneous generation. In order to demonstrate that the worms found in rotten meat did not appear spontaneously, he placed a piece of gauze over the meat. Flies, attracted by the odour, deposited their eggs on the gauze. From those eggs were hatched the worms, which had until then been supposed to begin life spontaneously in the flesh itself. This simple experiment marked some progress. Later on another Italian, a medical professor of{90} Padua, Vallisneri, recognized that the grub in a fruit is also hatched from an egg deposited by an insect before the development of the fruit.
The theory of spontaneous generation, still losing ground, appeared to be vanquished44 when the invention of the microscope at the end of the seventeenth century brought fresh arguments to its assistance. Whence came those thousands of creatures, only distinguishable on the slide of the microscope, those infinitely45 small beings which appeared in rain water as in any infusion46 of organic matter when exposed to the air? How could they be explained otherwise than through spontaneous generation, those bodies capable of producing 1,000,000 descendants in less than forty-eight hours.
The world of salons47 and of minor48 courts was pleased to have an opinion on this question. The Cardinal49 of Polignac, a diplomat50 and a man of letters, wrote in his leisure moments a long Latin poem entitled the Anti-Lucretius. After scouting51 Lucretius and other philosophers of the same school, the cardinal traced back to one Supreme52 Foresight53 the mechanism54 and organization of the entire world. By ingenious developments and circumlocutions, worthy55 of the Abbé Delille, the cardinal, while vaunting the wonders of the microscope, which he called “eye of our eye,” saw in it only another prodigy offered us by Almighty56 Wisdom. Of all those accumulated and verified arguments, this simple notion stood out: “The earth, which contains numberless germs, has not produced them. Everything in this world has its germ or seed.”
Diderot, who disseminated57 so many ideas (since borrowed by many people and used as if originated by them), wrote in some tumultuous pages on nature: “Does living matter combine with living matter? how? and with what result? And what about dead matter?”
About the middle of the eighteenth century the problem was again raised on scientific ground. Two priests, one an Englishman, Needham, and the other an Italian, Spallanzani, entered the lists. Needham, a great partisan59 of spontaneous generation, studied with Buffon some microscopic60 animalcul?. Buffon afterwards built up a whole system which became fashionable at that time. The force which Needham found in matter, a force which he called productive or vegetative, and which he regarded as charged with the formation of the organic world, Buffon explained by saying that there are certain primi{91}tive and incorruptible parts common to animals and to vegetables. These organic molecules61 cast themselves into the moulds or shapes which constituted different beings. When one of those moulds was destroyed by death, the organic molecules became free; ever active, they worked the putrefied matter, appropriating to themselves some raw particles and forming, said Buffon, “by their reunion, a multitude of little organized bodies, of which some, like earthworms, and fungi62, seem to be fair-sized animals or vegetables, but of which others, in almost infinite numbers, can only be seen through the microscope.”
All those bodies, according to him, only existed through spontaneous generation. Spontaneous generation takes place continually and universally after death and sometimes during life. Such was in his view the origin of intestinal63 worms. And, carrying his investigations64 further, he added, “The eels65 in flour paste, those of vinegar, all those so-called microscopic animals, are but different shapes taken spontaneously, according to circumstances, by that ever active matter which only tends to organization.”
The Abbé Spallanzani, armed with a microscope, studied these infinitesimal beings. He tried to distinguish them and their mode of life. Needham had affirmed that by enclosing putrescible matter in vases and by placing those vases on warm ashes, he produced animalcul?. Spallanzani suspected: firstly that Needham had not exposed the vases to a sufficient degree of heat to kill the seeds which were inside; and secondly66, that seeds could easily have entered those vases and given birth to animalcul?, for Needham had only closed his vases with cork67 stoppers, which are very porous68.
“I repeated that experiment with more accuracy,” wrote Spallanzani. “I used hermetically sealed vases. I kept them for an hour in boiling water, and after having opened them and examined their contents within a reasonable time I found not the slightest trace of animalcul?, though I had examined with the microscope the infusions69 from nineteen different vases.”
Thus dropped to the ground, in Spallanzani’s eyes, Needham’s singular theory, this famous vegetative force, this occult virtue70. Yet Needham did not own himself beaten. He retorted that Spallanzani had much weakened, perhaps destroyed, the vegetative force of the infused substances by{92} leaving his vases in boiling water during an hour. He advised him to try with less heat.
The public took an interest in this quarrel. In an opuscule entitled Singularities of Nature (1769), Voltaire, a born journalist, laughed at Needham, whom he turned into an Irish Jesuit to amuse his readers. Joking on this race of so-called eels which began life in the gravy71 of boiled mutton, he said: “At once several philosophers exclaimed at the wonder and said, ‘There is no germ; all is made, all is regenerated72 by a vital force of nature.’ ‘Attraction,’ said one; ‘Organized matter,’ said another, ‘they are organic molecules which have found their casts.’ Clever physicists73 were taken in by a Jesuit.”
In those pages, lightly penned, nothing remained of what Voltaire called “the ridiculous mistake, the unfortunate experiments of Needham, so triumphantly75 refuted by M. Spallanzani and rejected by whoever has studied nature at all.” “It is now demonstrated to sight and to reason that there is no vegetable, no animal but has its own germ.” In his Philosophic76 Dictionary, at the word God, “It is very strange,” said Voltaire, “that men should deny a creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels!” The Abbé Needham, meeting with these religious arguments, rather unexpected from Voltaire, endeavoured to prove that the hypothesis of spontaneous generation was in perfect accordance with religious beliefs. But both on Needham’s side and on Spallanzani’s there was a complete lack of conclusive77 proofs.
Philosophic argumentation always returned to the fore9. As recently as 1846 Ernest Bersot (a moralist who became later a director of the Ecole Normale) wrote in his book on Spiritualism: “The doctrine78 of spontaneous generation pleases simplicity79-loving minds; it leads them far beyond their own expectations. But it is yet only a private opinion, and, were it recognized, its virtue would have to be limited and narrowed down to the production of a few inferior animals.”
That doctrine was about to be noisily re-introduced.
On December 20, 1858, a correspondent of the Institute, M. Pouchet, director of the Natural History Museum of Rouen, sent to the Académie des Sciences a Note on Vegetable and Animal Proto-organisms spontaneously Generated in Artificial Air and in Oxygen Gas. The note began thus: “At this{93} time when, seconded by the progress of science, several naturalists are endeavouring to reduce the domain80 of spontaneous generation or even to deny its existence altogether, I have undertaken a series of researches with the object of elucidating81 this vexed82 question.” Pouchet, declaring that he had taken excessive precautions to preserve his experiments from any cause of error, proclaimed that he was prepared to demonstrate that “animals and plants could be generated in a medium absolutely free from atmospheric83 air, and in which, therefore, no germ of organic bodies could have been brought by air.”
On one copy of that communication, the opening of a four years’ scientific campaign, Pasteur had underlined the passages which he intended to submit to rigorous experimentation84. The scientific world was discussing the matter; Pasteur set himself to work.
A new installation, albeit85 a summary one, allowed him to attempt some delicate experiments. At one of the extremities86 of the fa?ade of the Ecole Normale, on the same line as the doorkeeper’s lodge87, a pavilion had been built for the school architect and his clerk. Pasteur succeeded in obtaining possession of this small building, and transformed it into a laboratory. He built a drying stove under the staircase; though he could only reach the stove by crawling on his knees, yet this was better than his old attic88. He also had a pleasant surprise—he was given a curator. He had deserved one sooner, for he had founded the institution of agrégés préparateurs. Remembering his own desire, on leaving the Ecole Normale, to have a year or two for independent study, he had wished to facilitate for others the obtaining of those few years of research and perhaps inspiration. Thanks to him, five places as laboratory curators were exclusively reserved to Ecole Normale students who had taken their degree (agrégés). The first curator who entered the new laboratory was Jules Raulin, a young man with a clear and sagacious mind, a calm and tenacious89 character, loving difficulties for the sake of overcoming them.
Pasteur began by the microscopic study of atmospheric air. “If germs exist in atmosphere,” he said, “could they not be arrested on their way?” It then occurred to him to draw—through an aspirator—a current of outside air through a tube containing a little plug of cotton wool. The current as it passed deposited on this sort of filter some of the solid corpuscles{94} contained in the air; the cotton wool often became black with those various kinds of dust. Pasteur assured himself that amongst various detritus90 those dusts presented spores92 and germs. “There are therefore in the air some organized corpuscles. Are they germs capable of vegetable productions, or of infusions? That is the question to solve.” He undertook a series of experiments to demonstrate that the most putrescible liquid remained pure indefinitely if placed out of the reach of atmospheric dusts. But it was sufficient to place in a pure liquid a particle of the cotton-wool filter to obtain an immediate93 alteration94.
A year before starting any discussion Pasteur wrote to Pouchet that the results which he had attained95 were “not founded on facts of a faultless exactitude. I think you are wrong, not in believing in spontaneous generation (for it is difficult in such a case not to have a preconceived idea), but in affirming the existence of spontaneous generation. In experimental science it is always a mistake not to doubt when facts do not compel affirmation.... In my opinion, the question is whole and untouched by decisive proofs. What is there in air which provokes organization? Are they germs? is it a solid? is it a gas? is it a fluid? is it a principle such as ozone96? All this is unknown and invites experiment.”
After a year’s study, Pasteur reached this conclusion: “Gases, fluids, electricity, magnetism97, ozone, things known or things occult, there is nothing in the air that is conditional98 to life, except the germs that it carries.”
Pouchet defended himself vigorously. To suppose that germs came from air seemed to him impossible. How many millions of loose eggs or spores would then be contained in a cubic millimetre of atmospheric air?
“What will be the outcome of this giant’s struggle?” grandiloquently99 wrote an editor of the Moniteur Scientifique (April, 1860). Pouchet answered this anonymous100 writer by advising him to accept the doctrine of spontaneous generation adopted of old by so many “men of genius.” Pouchet’s principal disciple101 was a lover of science and of letters, M. Nicolas Joly, an agrégé of natural science, doctor of medicine, and professor of physiology at Toulouse. He himself had a pupil, Charles Musset, who was preparing a thesis for his doctor’s degree under the title: New Experimental Researches on Heterogenia, or Spontaneous Generation. By the words{95} heterogenia or spontaneous generation Joly and Musset agreed in affirming that “they did not mean a creation out of nothing, but the production of a new organized being, lacking parents, and of which the primordial102 elements are drawn103 from ambient organic matter.”
Thus supported, Pouchet multiplied objections to the views of Pasteur, who had to meet every argument. Pasteur intended to narrow more and more the sphere of discussion. It was an ingenious operation to take the dusts from a cotton-wool filter, to disseminate58 them in a liquid, and thus to determine the alteration of that liquid; but the cotton wool itself was an organic substance and might be suspected. He therefore substituted for the cotton wool a plug of asbestos fibre, a mineral substance. He invented little glass flasks105 with a long curved neck; he filled them with an alterable liquid, which he deprived of germs by ebullition; the flask104 was in communication with the outer air through its curved tube, but the atmospheric germs were deposited in the curve of the neck without reaching the liquid; in order that alteration should take place, the vessel106 had to be inclined until the point where the liquid reached the dusts in the neck.
But Pouchet said, “How could germs contained in the air be numerous enough to develop in every organic infusion? Such a crowd of them would produce a thick mist as dense107 as iron.” Of all the difficulties this last seemed to Pasteur the hardest to solve. Could it not be that the dissemination108 of germs was more or less thick according to places? “Then,” cried the heterogenists, “there would be sterile109 zones and fecund110 zones, a most convenient hypothesis, indeed!” Pasteur let them laugh whilst he was preparing a series of flasks reserved for divers experiments. If spontaneous generation existed, it should invariably occur in vessels111 filled with the same alterable liquid. “Yet it is ever possible,” affirmed Pasteur, “to take up in certain places a notable though limited volume of ordinary air, having been submitted to no physical or chemical change, and still absolutely incapable112 of producing any alteration in an eminently113 putrescible liquor.” He was ready to prove that nothing was easier than to increase or to reduce the number either of the vessels where productions should appear or of the vessels where those productions should be lacking. After introducing into a series of flasks of a capacity of 250 cubic centimetres a very easily corrupted114 liquid, such as yeast115{96} water, he submitted each flask to ebullition. The neck of those vessels was ended off in a vertical116 point. Whilst the liquid was still boiling, he closed, with an enameller’s lamp, the pointed117 opening through which the steam had rushed out, taking with it all the air contained in the vessel. Those flasks were indeed calculated to satisfy both partisans118 or adversaries119 of spontaneous generation. If the extremity120 of the neck of one of these vessels was suddenly broken, all the ambient air rushed into the flask, bringing in all the suspended dusts; the bulb was closed again at once with the assistance of a jet of flame. Pasteur could then carry it away and place it in a temperature of 25-30° C., quite suitable for the development of germs and mucors.
In those series of tests some flasks showed some alteration, others remained pure, according to the place where the air had been admitted. During the beginning of the year 1860 Pasteur broke his bulb points and enclosed ordinary air in many different places, including the cellars of the Observatory121 of Paris. There, in that zone of an invariable temperature, the absolutely calm air could not be compared to the air he gathered in the yard of the same building. The results were also very different: out of ten vessels opened in the cellar, closed again and placed in the stove, only one showed any alteration; whilst eleven others, opened in the yard, all yielded organized bodies.
In a letter to his father (June, 1860), Pasteur wrote: “I have been prevented from writing by my experiments, which continue to be very curious. But it is such a wide subject that I have almost too many ideas of experiments. I am still being contradicted by two naturalists, M. Pouchet of Rouen and M. Joly of Toulouse. But I do not waste my time in answering them; they may say what they like, truth is on my side. They do not know how to experiment; it is not an easy art; it demands, besides certain natural qualities, a long practice which naturalists have not generally acquired nowadays.”
When the long vacation approached, Pasteur, who intended to go on a voyage of experiments, laid in a store of glass flasks. He wrote to Chappuis, on August 10, 1860: “I fear from your letter that you will not go to the Alps this year.... Besides the pleasure of having you for a guide, I had hoped to utilize122 your love of science by offering you the modest part of curator. It is by some study of air on heights afar from habitations and vegetation that I want to conclude my work on so-called spon{97}taneous generation. The real interest of that work for me lies in the connection of this subject with that of ferments123 which I shall take up again November.”
Pasteur started for Arbois, taking with him seventy-three flasks; he opened twenty of them not very far from his father’s tannery, on the road to D?le, along an old road, now a path which leads to the mount of the Bergère. The vine labourers who passed him wondered what this holiday tourist could be doing with all those little phials; no one suspected that he was penetrating124 one of nature’s greatest secrets. “What would you have?” merrily said his old friend, Jules Vercel; “it amuses him!” Of those twenty vessels, opened some distance away from any dwelling125, eight yielded organized bodies.
Pasteur went on to Salins and climbed Mount Poupet, 850 metres above the sea-level. Out of twenty vessels opened, only five were altered. Pasteur would have liked to charter a balloon in order to prove that the higher you go the fewer germs you find, and that certain zones absolutely pure contain none at all. It was easier to go into the Alps.
He arrived at Chamonix on September 20, and engaged a guide to make the ascent126 of the Montanvert. The very next morning this novel sort of expedition started. A mule127 carried the case of thirty-three vessels, followed very closely by Pasteur, who watched over the precious burden and walked alongside of precipices129 supporting the case with one hand so that it should not be shaken.
When the first experiments were started an incident occurred. Pasteur has himself related this fact in his report to the Académie. “In order to close again the point of the flasks after taking in the air, I had taken with me an eolipyle spirit-lamp. The dazzling whiteness of the ice in the sunlight was such that it was impossible to distinguish the jet of burning alcohol, and as moreover that was slightly moved by the wind, it never remained on the broken glass long enough to hermetically seal my vessel. All the means I might have employed to make the flame visible and consequently directable would inevitably130 have given rise to causes of error by spreading strange dusts into the air. I was therefore obliged to bring back to the little inn of Montanvert, unsealed, the flasks which I had opened on the glacier131.”
The inn was a sort of hut, letting in wind and rain. The thirteen open vessels were exposed to all the dusts in the room{98} where Pasteur slept; nearly all of them presented alterations132.
In the meanwhile the guide was sent to Chamonix where a tinker undertook to modify the lamp in view of the coming experiment.
The next morning, twenty flasks, which have remained celebrated in the world of scientific investigators133, were brought to the Mer de Glace. Pasteur gathered the air with infinite precautions; he used to enjoy relating these details to those people who call everything easy. After tracing with a steel point a line on the glass, careful lest dusts should become a cause of error, he began by heating the neck and fine point of the bulb in the flame of the little spirit-lamp. Then raising the vessel above his head, he broke the point with steel nippers, the long ends of which had also been heated in order to burn the dusts which might be on their surface and which would have been driven into the vessel by the quick inrush of the air. Of those twenty flasks, closed again immediately, only one was altered. “If all the results are compared that I have obtained until now,” he wrote, on March 5, 1880, when relating this journey to the Académie, “it seems to me that it can be affirmed that the dusts suspended in atmospheric air are the exclusive origin, the necessary condition of life in infusions.”
And in an unnoticed little sentence, pointing already then to the goal he had in view, “What would be most desirable would be to push those studies far enough to prepare the road for a serious research into the origin of various diseases.” The action of those little beings, agents not only of fermentation but also of disorganization and putrefaction134, already dawned upon him.
While Pasteur was going from the Observatoire cellars to the Mer de Glace, Pouchet was gathering135 air on the plains of Sicily, making experiments on Etna, and on the sea. He saw everywhere, he wrote, “air equally favourable136 to organic genesis, whether surcharged with detritus in the midst of our populous137 cities, or taken on the summit of a mountain, or on the sea, where it offers extreme purity. With a cubic decimetre of air, taken where you like, I affirm that you can ever produce legions of microzoa.”
And the heterogenists proclaimed in unison138 that “everywhere, strictly139 everywhere, air is constantly favourable to life.” Those who followed the debate nearly all leaned towards{99} Pouchet. “I am afraid,” wrote a scientific journalist in La Presse (1860), “that the experiments you quote, M. Pasteur, will turn against you.... The world into which you wish to take us is really too fantastic....”
And yet some adversaries should have been struck by the efforts of a mind which, while marching forward to establish new facts, was ever seeking arguments against itself, and turned back to strengthen points which seemed yet weak. In November, Pasteur returned to his studies on fermentations in general and lactic fermentation in particular. Endeavouring to bring into evidence the animated140 nature of the lactic ferment3, and to indicate the most suitable surroundings for the self-development of that ferment, he had come across some complications which hampered141 the purity and the progress of that culture. Then he had perceived another fermentation, following upon lactic fermentation and known as butyric fermentation. As he did not immediately perceive the origin of this butyric acid—which causes the bad smell in rancid butter—he ended by being struck by the inevitable142 coincidence between the (then called) infusory animalcul? and the production of this acid.
“The most constantly repeated tests,” he wrote in February, 1861, “have convinced me that the transformation143 of sugar, mannite and lactic acid into butyric acid is due exclusively to those Infusories, and they must be considered as the real butyric ferment.” Those vibriones that Pasteur described as under the shape of small cylindric144 rods with rounded ends, sliding about, sometimes in a chain of three or four articles, he sowed in an appropriate medium, as he sowed beer yeast. But, by a strange phenomenon, “those infusory animalcul?,” he said, “live and multiply indefinitely, without requiring the least quantity of air. And not only do they live without air, but air actually kills them. It is sufficient to send a current of atmospheric air during an hour or two through the liquor where those vibriones were multiplying to cause them all to perish and thus to arrest butyric fermentation, whilst a current of pure carbonic acid gas passing through that same liquor hindered them in no way. Thence this double proposition,” concluded Pasteur; “the butyric ferment is an infusory; that infusory lives without free oxygen.” He afterwards called ana?robes those beings which do not require air, in opposition145 to the name of a?robes given to other microscopic beings who require air to live.{100}
Biot, without knowing all the consequences of these studies, had not been long in perceiving that he had been far too sceptical, and that physiological discoveries of the very first rank would be the outcome of researches on so-called spontaneous generation. He would have wished, before he died, not only that Pasteur should be the unanimously selected candidate for the 1861 Zecker prize in the Chemistry Section, but also that his friend, forty-eight years younger than himself, should be a member of the Institute. At the beginning of 1861, there was one vacancy146 in the Botanical Section. Biot took advantage of the researches pursued by Pasteur within the last three years, to say and to print that he should be nominated as a candidate. “I can hear the commonplace objection: he is a chemist, a physicist74, not a professional botanist147.... But that very versatility148, ever active and ever successful, should be a title in his favour.... Let us judge of men by their works and not by the destination more or less wide or narrow that they have marked out for themselves. Pasteur made his début before the Académie in 1848, with the remarkable149 treatise150 which contained by implication the resolution of the paratartaric acid into its two components151, right and left. He was then twenty-six; the sensation produced is not forgotten. Since then, during the twelve years which followed, he has submitted to your appreciation152 twenty-one papers, the last ten relating to vegetable physiology. All are full of new facts, often very unexpected, several very far reaching, not one of which has been found inaccurate153 by competent judges. If to-day, by your suffrage154, you introduce M. Pasteur into the Botanical Section, as you might safely have done for Théodore de Saussure or Ingenhousz, you will have acquired for the Académie and for that particular section an experimentalist of the same order as those two great men.”
Balard, who in this academic campaign made common cause with Biot, was also making efforts to persuade several members of the Botanical Section. He was walking one day in the Luxembourg with Moquin-Tandon, pouring out, in his rasping voice, arguments in favour of Pasteur. “Well,” said Moquin-Tandon, “let us go to Pasteur’s, and if you find a botanical work in his library I shall put him on the list.” It was a witty155 form given to the scruples156 of the botanists157. Pasteur only had twenty-four votes; Duchartre was elected.
The study of a microscopic fungus158, capable by itself of{101} transforming wine into vinegar, the bringing to light of the action of that mycoderma, endowed with the power of taking oxygen from air and fixing it upon alcohol, thus transforming the latter into acetic159 acid; the most ingenious experiments to demonstrate the absolute and exclusive power of the little plant, all gave reason to Biot’s affirmation that such skill in the observation of inferior vegetables equalled any botanist’s claim. Pasteur, showing that the interpretations160 of the causes which act in the formation of vinegar were false, and that alone the microscopic fungus did everything, was constantly dwelling on this power of the infinitesimally small. “Mycoderma,” he said, “can bring the action of combustion161 of the oxygen in air to bear on a number of organic materia. If microscopic beings were to disappear from our globe, the surface of the earth would be encumbered162 with dead organic matter and corpses163 of all kinds, animal and vegetable. It is chiefly they who give to oxygen its powers of combustion. Without them, life would become impossible because death would be incomplete.”
Pasteur’s ideas on fermentation and putrefaction were being adopted by disciples164 unknown to him. “I am sending you,” he wrote to his father, “a treatise on fermentation, which was the subject of a recent competition at the Montpellier Faculty165. This work is dedicated166 to me by its author, whom I do not know at all, a circumstance which shows that my results are spreading and exciting some attention.
“I have only read the last pages, which have pleased me; if the rest is the same, it is a very good résumé, entirely conceived in the new direction of my labours, evidently well understood by this young doctor.
“M. Biot is very well, only suffering a little from insomnia167. He has, fortunately for his health, finished that great account of my former results which will be the greatest title I can have to the esteem168 of scientists.”
Biot died without having realized his last wish, which was to have Pasteur for a colleague. It was only at the end of the year 1862 that Pasteur was nominated by the Mineralogical Section for the seat of Senarmont. This new candidature did not go without a hitch169. In his study on tartrates, Pasteur, as will be remembered, had discovered that their crystalline forms were hemihedral. When he examined the characteristic faces, he held the crystal in a particular way and said: “It is hemihedral on the right side.” A German mineralogist, named{102} Rammelsberg, holding the crystal in the opposite direction, said: “It is hemihedral on the left side.” It was a mere170 matter of conventional orientation171; nothing was changed in the scientific results announced by Pasteur. But some adversaries made a weapon of that inverted172 crystal; not a dangerous weapon, thought Pasteur at first, fancying that a few words would clear the misunderstanding. But the campaign persisted, with insinuations, murmurs173, whisperings. When Pasteur saw this simple difference in the way the crystal was held stigmatised as a cause of error, he desired to cut short this quarrel made in Germany. He then had with him no longer Raulin, but M. Duclaux, who was beginning his scientific life. M. Duclaux remembers one day when Pasteur, seeing that incontrovertible arguments were required, sent for a cabinet maker174 with his tools. He superintended the making of a complete wooden set of the crystalline forms of tartrates, a gigantic set, such as Gulliver might have seen in Brobdingnag if he had studied geometrical forms in that island. A coating of coloured paper finished the work; green paper marked the hemihedral face. A member of the Philomathic Society, Pasteur asked the Society to give up the meeting of November 8, 1862, to the discussion of that subject. Several of his colleagues vainly endeavoured to dissuade175 him from that intention; Pasteur hearkened to no one. He took with him his provision of wooden crystals, and gave a vivid and impassioned lecture. “If you know the question,” he asked his adversaries, “where is your conscience? If you know it not, why meddle176 with it?” And with one of his accustomed sudden turns, “What is all this?” he added. “One of those incidents to which we all, more or less, are exposed by the conditions of our career; no bitterness remains behind. Of what account is it in the presence of those mysteries, so varied, so numerous, that we all, in divers directions, are working to clear? It is true I have had recourse to an unusual means of defending myself against attacks not openly published, but I think that means was safe and loyal, and deferential177 towards you. And,” he added, thinking of Biot and Senarmont, “will you have my full confession178? You know that I had during fifteen years the inestimable advantage of the intercourse179 of two men who are no more, but whose scientific probity180 shone as one of the beacons181 of the Académie des Sciences. Before deciding on the course I have now followed, I questioned my memory and{103} endeavoured to revive their advice, and it seemed to me that they would not have disowned me.”
M. Duclaux said about this meeting: “Pasteur has since then won many oratorical182 victories. I do not know of a greater one than that deserved by that acute and penetrating improvisation183. He was still much heated as we were walking back to the Rue25 d’Ulm, and I remember making him laugh by asking him why, in the state of mind he was in, he had not concluded by hurling184 his wooden crystals at his adversaries’ heads.”
On December 8, 1862, Pasteur was elected a member of the Académie des Sciences; out of sixty voters he received thirty-six suffrages185.
The next morning, when the gates of the Montparnasse cemetery186 were opened, a woman walked towards Biot’s grave with her hands full of flowers. It was Mme. Pasteur who was bringing them to him who lay there since February 5, 1862, and who had loved Pasteur with so deep an affection.
A letter picked up at a sale of autographs, one of the last Biot wrote, gives a finishing touch to his moral portrait. It is addressed to an unknown person discouraged with this life. “Sir,—The confidence you honour me with touches me. But I am not a physician of souls. However, in my opinion, you could not do better than seek remedies to your moral suffering in work, religion, and charity. A useful work taken up with energy and persevered187 in will revive by occupation the forces of your mind. Religious feelings will console you by inspiring you with patience. Charity manifested to others will soften188 your sorrows and teach you that you are not alone to suffer in this life. Look around you, and you will see afflicted189 ones more to be pitied than yourself. Try to ease their sufferings; the good you will do to them will fall back upon yourself and will show you that a life which can thus be employed is not a burden which cannot, which must not be borne.”
On his entering the Académie des Sciences, Balard and Dumas advised Pasteur to let alone his wooden crystals and to continue his studies on ferments. He undertook to demonstrate that “the hypothesis of a phenomenon of mere contact is not more admissible than the opinion which placed the ferment character exclusively in dead albuminoid matter.” Whilst continuing his researches on beings which could live without air, he tried, as he went along, à propos of spontaneous generation, to find some weak point in his work. Until now the{104} liquids he had used, however alterable they were, had been brought up to boiling point. Was there not some new and decisive experiment to make? Could he not study organic matter as constituted by life and expose to the contact of air deprived of its germs some fresh liquids, highly putrescible, such as blood and urine? Claude Bernard, joining in these experiments of Pasteur’s, himself took some blood from a dog. This blood was sealed up in a glass phial, with every condition of purity, and the phial remained in a stove constantly heated up to 30°C. from March 3 until April 20, 1862, when Pasteur laid it on the Académie table. The blood had suffered no sort of putrefaction; neither had some urine treated in the same way. “The conclusions to which I have been led by my first series of experiments,” said Pasteur before the Académie, “are therefore applicable in all cases to organic substances.”
While studying putrefaction, which is itself but a fermentation applied190 to animal materia, while showing the marvellous power of the infinitesimally small, he foresaw the immensity of the domain he had conquered, as will be proved by the following incident. Some time after the Académie election, in March, 1863, the Emperor, who took an interest in all that took place in the small laboratory of the Rue d’Ulm, desired to speak with Pasteur. J. B. Dumas claimed the privilege of presenting his former pupil, and the interview took place at the Tuileries. Napoleon questioned Pasteur with a gentle, slightly dreamy insistence191. Pasteur wrote the next day: “I assured the Emperor that all my ambition was to arrive at the knowledge of the causes of putrid192 and contagious193 diseases.”
In the meanwhile, the chapter on ferments was not yet closed; Pasteur was attracted by studies on wine. At the beginning of the 1863 holidays, just before starting for Arbois, he drew up this programme with one of his pupils: “From the 20th to the 30th (August) preparation in Paris of all the vessels, apparatus194, products, that we must take. September 1, departure for the Jura; installation; purchase of the products of a vineyard. Immediate beginning of tests of all kinds. We shall have to hurry; grapes do not keep long.”
Whilst he was preparing this vintage tour, which he intended to make with three “Normaliens,” Duclaux, Gernez and Lechartier, the three heterogenists, Pouchet, Joly and Musset, proposed to use that same time in fighting Pasteur on his own ground. They started from Bagnères-de-Luchon{105} followed by several guides and taking with them all kinds of provisions and some little glass flasks with a slender pointed neck. They crossed the pass of Venasque without incident, and decided195 to go further, to the Rencluse. Some isard-stalkers having come towards the strange-looking party, they were signalled away; even the guides were invited to stand aside. It was necessary to prevent any dusts from reaching the bulbs, which were thus opened at 8 p.m. at a height of 2,083 metres. But eighty-three metres higher than the Montanvert did not seem to them enough, they wished to go higher. “We shall sleep on the mountain,” said the three scientists. Fatigue196 and bitter cold, they withstood everything with the courage inspired by a problem to solve. The next morning they climbed across that rocky chaos197, and at last reached the foot of one of the greatest glaciers198 of the Maladetta, 3,000 metres above the sea-level. “A very deep narrow crevasse,” says Pouchet, “seemed to us the most suitable place for our experiments.” Four phials (filled with a decoction of hay) were opened and sealed again with precautions that Pouchet considered as exaggerated.
Pouchet, in his merely scientific report, does not relate the return journey, yet more perilous199 than the ascent. At one of the most dangerous places, Joly slipped, and would have rolled into a precipice128, but for the strength and presence of mind of one of the guides. All three at last came back to Luchon, forgetful of dangers run, and glorying at having reached 1,000 metres higher than Pasteur. They triumphed when they saw alteration in their flasks! “Therefore,” said Pouchet, “the air of the Maladetta, and of high mountains in general, is not incapable of producing alteration in an eminently putrescible liquor; therefore heterogenia or the production of a new being devoid200 of parents, but formed at the expense of ambient organic matter, is for us a reality.”
The Academy of Sciences was taking more and more interest in this debate. In November, 1863, Joly and Musset expressed a wish that the Academy should appoint a Commission, before whom the principal experiments of Pasteur and of his adversaries should be repeated. On this occasion Flourens expressed his opinion thus: “I am blamed in certain quarters for giving no opinion on the question of spontaneous generation. As long as my opinion was not formed, I had{106} nothing to say. It is now formed, and I give it: M. Pasteur’s experiments are decisive. If spontaneous generation is real, what is required to obtain animalcul?? Air and putrescible liquor. M. Pasteur puts air and putrescible liquor together and nothing happens. Therefore spontaneous generation is not. To doubt further is to misunderstand the question.”
Already in the preceding year, the Académie itself had evidenced its opinion by giving Pasteur the prize of a competition proposed in these terms: “To attempt to throw some new light upon the question of so-called spontaneous generation by well-conducted experiments.” Pasteur’s treatise on Organized Corpuscles existing in Atmosphere had been unanimously preferred. Pasteur might have entrenched himself behind the suffrages of the Academy, but begged it, in order to close those incessant201 debates, to appoint the Commission demanded by Joly and Musset.
The members of the Commission were Flourens, Dumas, Brongniart, Milne-Edwards, and Balard. Pasteur wished that the discussion should take place as soon as possible, and it was fixed202 for the first fortnight in March. But Pouchet, Joly and Musset asked for a delay on account of the cold. “We consider that it might compromise, perhaps prevent, our results, to operate in a temperature which often goes below zero even in the south of France. How do we know that it will not freeze in Paris between the first and fifteenth of March?” They even asked the Commission to adjourn203 experiments until the summer. “I am much surprised,” wrote Pasteur, “at the delay sought by Messrs. Pouchet, Joly and Musset; it would have been easy with a stove to raise the temperature to the degree required by those gentlemen. For my part I hasten to assure the Academy that I am at its disposal, and that in summer, or in any other season, I am ready to repeat my experiments.”
Some evening scientific lectures had just been inaugurated at the Sorbonne; such a subject as spontaneous generation was naturally on the programme. When Pasteur entered the large lecture room of the Sorbonne on April 7, 1864, he must have been reminded of the days of his youth, when crowds came, as to a theatrical204 performance, to hear J. B. Dumas speak. Dumas’ pupil, now a master, in his turn found a still greater crowd invading every corner. Amongst the professors and students, such celebrities205 as Duruy,{107} Alexandre Dumas senior, George Sand, Princess Mathilde, were being pointed out. Around them, the inevitable “smart” people who must see everything and be seen everywhere, without whom no function favoured by fashion would be complete; in short what is known as the “Tout Paris.” But this “Tout Paris” was about to receive a novel impression, probably a lasting206 one. The man who stood before this fashionable audience was not one of those speakers who attempt by an insinuating207 exordium to gain the good graces of their hearers; it was a grave-looking man, his face full of quiet energy and reflective force. He began in a deep, firm voice, evidently earnestly convinced of the greatness of his mission as a teacher: “Great problems are now being handled, keeping every thinking man in suspense208; the unity209 or multiplicity of human races; the creation of man 1,000 years or 1,000 centuries ago, the fixity of species, or the slow and progressive transformation of one species into another; the eternity210 of matter; the idea of a God unnecessary. Such are some of the questions that humanity discusses nowadays.”
He had now, he continued, entered upon a subject accessible to experimentation, and which he had made the object of the strictest and most conscientious211 studies. Can matter organize itself? Can living beings come into the world without having been preceded by beings similar to them? After showing that the doctrine of spontaneous generation had gradually lost ground, he explained how the invention of the microscope had caused it to reappear at the end of the seventeenth century, “in the face of those beings, so numerous, so varied, so strange in their shapes, the origin of which was connected with the presence of all dead vegetable and animal matter in a state of disorganization.” He went on to say how Pouchet had taken up this study, and to point out the errors that this new partisan of an old doctrine had committed, errors difficult to recognize at first. With perfect clearness and simplicity, Pasteur explained how the dusts which are suspended in air contain germs of inferior organized beings and how a liquid preserved, by certain precautions, from the contact of these germs can be kept indefinitely, giving his audience a glimpse of his laboratory methods.
“Here,” he said, “is an infusion of organic matter, as limpid212 as distilled213 water, and extremely alterable. It has been{108} prepared to-day. To-morrow it will contain animalcul?, little infusories, or flakes214 of mouldiness.
“I place a portion of that infusion into a flask with a long neck, like this one. Suppose I boil the liquid and leave it to cool. After a few days, mouldiness or animalcul? will develop in the liquid. By boiling, I destroyed any germs contained in the liquid or against the glass; but that infusion being again in contact with air, it becomes altered, as all infusions do. Now suppose I repeat this experiment, but that, before boiling the liquid, I draw (by means of an enameller’s lamp) the neck of the flask into a point, leaving, however, its extremity open. This being done, I boil the liquid in the flask, and leave it to cool. Now the liquid of this second flask will remain pure not only two days, a month, a year, but three or four years—for the experiment I am telling you about is already four years old, and the liquid remains as limpid as distilled water. What difference is there, then, between those two vases? They contain the same liquid, they both contain air, both are open! Why does one decay and the other remain pure? The only difference between them is this: in the first case, the dusts suspended in air and their germs can fall into the neck of the flask and arrive into contact with the liquid, where they find appropriate food and develop; thence microscopic beings. In the second flask, on the contrary, it is impossible, or at least extremely difficult, unless air is violently shaken, that dusts suspended in air should enter the vase; they fall on its curved neck. When air goes in and out of the vase through diffusions or variations of temperature, the latter never being sudden, the air comes in slowly enough to drop the dusts and germs that it carries at the opening of the neck or in the first curves.
“This experiment is full of instruction; for this must be noted215, that everything in air save its dusts can easily enter the vase and come into contact with the liquid. Imagine what you choose in the air—electricity, magnetism, ozone, unknown forces even, all can reach the infusion. Only one thing cannot enter easily, and that is dust, suspended in air. And the proof of this is that if I shake the vase violently two or three times, in a few days it contains animalcul? or mouldiness. Why? because air has come in violently enough to carry dust with it.
“And, therefore, gentlemen, I could point to that liquid and say to you, I have taken my drop of water from the immensity of creation, and I have taken it full of the elements appropriated{109} to the development of inferior beings. And I wait, I watch, I question it, begging it to recommence for me the beautiful spectacle of the first creation. But it is dumb, dumb since these experiments were begun several years ago; it is dumb because I have kept it from the only thing man cannot produce, from the germs which float in the air, from Life, for Life is a germ and a germ is Life. Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment.”
The public enthusiastically applauded these words, which ended the lecture:
“No, there is now no circumstance known in which it can be affirmed that microscopic beings came into the world without germs, without parents similar to themselves. Those who affirm it have been duped by illusions, by ill-conducted experiments, spoilt by errors that they either did not perceive or did not know how to avoid.”
In the meanwhile, besides public lectures and new studies, Pasteur succeeded in “administering” the Ecole Normale in the most complete sense of the word. His influence was such that students acquired not a taste but a passion for study; he directed each one in his own line, he awakened216 their instincts. It was already through his wise inspiration that five “Normaliens agrégés” should have the chance of the five curators’ places; but his solicitude217 did not stop there. If some disappointment befell some former pupil, still in that period of youth which doubts nothing or nobody, he came vigorously to his assistance; he was the counsellor of the future. A few letters will show how he understood his responsibility.
A Normalien, Paul Dalimier, received 1st at the agrégation of Physics in 1858, afterwards Natural History curator at the Ecole, and who, having taken his doctor’s degree, asked to be sent to a Faculty, was ordered to go to the Lycée of Chaumont.
In the face of this almost disgrace he wrote a despairing letter to Pasteur. He could do nothing more, he said, his career was ruined. “My dear sir,” answered Pasteur, “I much regret that I could not see you before your departure for Chaumont. But here is the advice which I feel will be useful to you. Do not manifest your just displeasure; but attract attention from the very first by your zeal and talent. In a word, aggravate218, by your fine discharge of your new duties, the injustice219 which has been committed. The discouragement expressed in your{110} last letter is not worthy of a man of science. Keep but three objects before your eyes: your class, your pupils and the work you have begun.... Do your duty to the best of your ability, without troubling about the rest.”
Pasteur undertook the rest himself. He went to the Ministry220 to complain of the injustice and unfairness, from a general point of view, of that nomination221.
“Sir,” answered the Chaumont exile, “I have received your kind letter. My deep respect for every word of yours will guarantee my intention to follow your advice. I have given myself up entirely to my class. I have found here a Physics cabinet in a deplorable state, and I have undertaken to reorganise it.”
He had not time to finish: justice was done, and Paul Dalimier was made ma?tre des conférences at the Ecole Normale. He died at twenty-eight.
The wish that masters and pupils should remain in touch with each other after the three years at the Ecole Normale had already in 1859 inspired Pasteur to write a report on the desirableness of an annual report entitled, Scientific Annals of the Ecole Normale.
The initiative of pregnant ideas often is traced back to France. But, through want of tenacity222, she allows those same ideas to fall into decay and they are taken up by other nations, transplanted, developed, until they come back unrecognized to their mother country. Germany had seen the possibilities of such a publication as Pasteur’s projected Annals. Renan wrote about that time to the editors of the Revue Germanique, a Review intended to draw France and Germany together: “In France, nothing is made public until achieved and ripened223. In Germany, a work is given out provisionally, not as a teaching, but as an incitement224 to think, as a ferment for the mind.”
Pasteur felt all the power of that intellectual ferment. In the volume entitled Centenary of the Ecole Normale, M. Gernez has recalled Pasteur’s enthusiasm when he spoke225 of those Annals. Was it not for former pupils, away in the provinces, a means of collaborating226 with their old masters and of keeping in touch with Paris?
It was in June, 1864, that Pasteur presented the first number of this publication to the Académie des Sciences. M. Gernez, who was highly thought of by Pasteur, has not related in the Centenary that the book opened with some of his own{111} researches on the rotatory power of certain liquids and their steam.
At that same time, the heterogenists had at last placed themselves at the disposal of the Académie and were invited to meet Pasteur before the Natural History Commission at M. Chevreul’s laboratory. “I affirm,” said Pasteur, “that in any place it is possible to take up from the ambient atmosphere a determined227 volume of air containing neither egg nor spore91 and producing no generation in putrescible solutions.” The Commission declared that, the whole contest bearing upon one simple fact, one experiment only should take place. The heterogenists wanted to recommence a whole series of experiments, thus reopening the discussion. The Commission refused, and the heterogenists, unwilling228 to concede the point, retired229 from the field, repudiating230 the arbiters231 that they had themselves chosen.
And yet Joly had written to the Académie, “If one only of our flasks remains pure, we will loyally own our defeat.” A scientist who later became Permanent Secretary of the Académie des Sciences, Jamin, wrote about this conflict: “The heterogenists, however they may have coloured their retreat, have condemned232 themselves. If they had been sure of the fact—which they had solemnly engaged to prove or to own themselves vanquished,—they would have insisted on showing it, it would have been the triumph of their doctrine.”
The heterogenists appealed to the public. A few days after their defeat, Joly gave a lecture at the Faculty of Medicine. He called the trial, as decided on by the Commission, a “circus competition”; he was applauded by those who saw other than scientific questions in the matter. The problem was now coming down from mountains and laboratories into the arena233 of society discussions. If all comes from a germ, people said, whence came the first germ? We must bow before that mystery, said Pasteur; it is the question of the origin of all things, and absolutely outside the domain of scientific research. But an invincible234 curiosity exists amongst most men which cannot admit that science should have the wisdom to content itself with the vast space between the beginning of the world and the unknown future. Many people transform a question of fact into a question of faith. Though Pasteur had brought into his researches a solely235 scientific preoccupation, many people approved or blamed him as the defender236 of a religious cause.{112}
Vainly had he said, “There is here no question of religion, philosophy, atheism237, materialism238, or spiritualism. I might even add that they do not matter to me as a scientist. It is a question of fact; when I took it up I was as ready to be convinced by experiments that spontaneous generation exists as I am now persuaded that those who believe it are blindfolded239.”
It might have been thought that Pasteur’s arguments were in support of a philosophical240 theory! It seemed impossible to those whose ideas came from an ardent241 faith, from the influence of their surroundings, from personal pride or from interested calculations to understand that a man should seek truth for its own sake and with no other object than to proclaim it. Hostilities242 were opened, journalists kept up the fire. A priest, the Abbé Moigno spoke of converting unbelievers through the proved non-existence of spontaneous generation. The celebrated novelist, Edmond About, took up Pouchet’s cause with sparkling irony243. “M. Pasteur preached at the Sorbonne amidst a concert of applause which must have gladdened the angels.”
Thus, among the papers and reviews of that time we can follow the divers ideas brought out by these discussions. Guizot, then almost eighty, touched on this problem with the slightly haughty244 assurance of one conscious of having given much thought to his beliefs and destiny. “Man has not been formed through spontaneous generation, that is by a creative and organizing force inherent in matter; scientific observation daily overturns that theory, by which, moreover, it is impossible to explain the first appearance upon the earth of man in his complete state.” And he praised “M. Pasteur, who has brought into this question the light of his scrupulous245 criticism.”
Nisard was a wondering witness of what took place in the small laboratory of the Ecole Normale. Ever preoccupied246 by the relations between science and religion, he heard with some surprise Pasteur saying modestly, “Researches on primary causes are not in the domain of Science, which only recognizes facts and phenomena which it can demonstrate.”
Pasteur did not disinterest himself from the great problems which he called the eternal subjects of men’s solitary247 meditations248. But he did not admit the interference of religion with science any more than that of science with religion.{113}
His eagerness during a conflict was only equalled by his absolute forgetfulness after the conflict was over. He answered some one who, years later, reminded him of that past so full of attacks and praises. “A man of science should think of what will be said of him in the following century, not of the insults or the compliments of one day.”
Pasteur, anxious to regain249 lost time, hurried to return to his studies on wine. “Might not the diseases of wines,” he said at the Académie des Sciences in January, 1864, “be caused by organized ferments, microscopic vegetations, of which the germs would develop when certain circumstances of temperature, of atmospheric variations, of exposure to air, would favour their evolution or their introduction into wines?... I have indeed reached this result that the alterations of wines are co-existent with the presence and multiplication250 of microscopic vegetations.” Acid wines, bitter wines, “ropy” wines, sour wines, he had studied them all with a microscope, his surest guide in recognizing the existence and form of the evil.
As he had more particularly endeavoured to remedy the cause of the acidity251 which often ruins the Jura red or white wines in the wood, the town of Arbois, proud of its celebrated rosy252 and tawny253 wines, placed an impromptu254 laboratory at his disposal during the holidays of 1864; the expenses were all to be covered by the town. “This spontaneous offer from a town dear to me for so many reasons,” answered Pasteur to the Mayor and Town Council, “does too much honour to my modest labours, and the way in which it is made covers me with confusion.” He refused it however, fearing that the services he might render should not be proportionate to the generosity255 of the Council. He preferred to camp out with his curators in an old coffee room at the entrance of the town, and they contented256 themselves with apparatus of the most primitive257 description, generally made by some local tinker or shoeing smith.
The problem consisted, in Pasteur’s view, in opposing the development of organized ferments or parasitic258 vegetations, causes of the diseases of wines. After some fruitless endeavours to destroy all vitality259 in the germs of these parasites260, he found that it was sufficient to keep the wine for a few moments at a temperature of 50° C. to 60° C. “I have also ascertained261 that wine was never altered by that preliminary operation, and as nothing prevents it afterwards from under{114}going the gradual action of the oxygen in the air—the only cause, as I think, of its improvement with age—it is evident that this process offers every advantage.”
It seems as if that simple and practical means, applicable to every quality of wine, now only had to be tried. But not so. Every progress is opposed by prejudice, petty jealousies262, indolence even. A devoted263 obstinacy264 is required in order to overcome this opposition. Pasteur’s desire was that his country should benefit by his discovery. An Englishman had written to him: “People are astonished in France that the sale of French wines should not have become more extended here since the Commercial Treaties. The reason is simple enough. At first we eagerly welcomed those wines, but we soon had the sad experience that there was too much loss occasioned by the diseases to which they are subject.”
Pasteur was in the midst of those discussions, experimental sittings, etc., when J. B. Dumas suddenly asked of him the greatest of sacrifices, that of leaving the laboratory.
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physiology
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| n.生理学，生理机能 | |
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alcoholic
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| adj.（含）酒精的，由酒精引起的；n.酗酒者 | |
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ferment
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| vt.使发酵；n./vt.（使）激动，（使）动乱 | |
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lactic
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physiological
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| adj.生理学的，生理学上的 | |
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celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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attain
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| vt.达到，获得，完成 | |
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depicted
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| 描绘，描画( depict的过去式和过去分词 )； 描述 | |
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fore
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distinguished
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kindly
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zeal
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penetration
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expounded
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| 论述，详细讲解( expound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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realization
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| n.实现；认识到，深刻了解 | |
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confidentially
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molecular
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varied
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divers
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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21
aggregate
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| adj.总计的，集合的；n.总数；v.合计；集合 | |
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22
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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23
vistas
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| 长条形景色( vista的名词复数 )； 回顾； 展望； （未来可能发生的）一系列情景 | |
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24
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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25
rue
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| n.懊悔，芸香，后悔；v.后悔，悲伤，懊悔 | |
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26
persevering
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| a.坚忍不拔的 | |
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27
frail
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| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
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28
edifice
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| n.宏伟的建筑物(如宫殿，教室) | |
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29
lamentably
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| adv.哀伤地，拙劣地 | |
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30
verge
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| n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临 | |
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31
attachment
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| n.附属物，附件；依恋；依附 | |
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32
relinquish
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| v.放弃，撤回，让与，放手 | |
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33
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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34
remonstrances
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| n.抱怨，抗议( remonstrance的名词复数 ) | |
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35
entrenched
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| adj.确立的，不容易改的(风俗习惯) | |
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36
dint
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| n.由于，靠；凹坑 | |
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37
indefatigable
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| adj.不知疲倦的，不屈不挠的 | |
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38
naturalists
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| n.博物学家( naturalist的名词复数 )；（文学艺术的）自然主义者 | |
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39
prodigy
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| n.惊人的事物，奇迹，神童，天才，预兆 | |
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40
linen
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| n.亚麻布，亚麻线，亚麻制品；adj.亚麻布制的，亚麻的 | |
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41
engendered
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| v.产生（某形势或状况），造成，引起( engender的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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42
credulous
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| adj.轻信的，易信的 | |
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43
phenomena
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| n.现象 | |
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44
vanquished
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| v.征服( vanquish的过去式和过去分词 )；战胜；克服；抑制 | |
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45
infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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46
infusion
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| n.灌输 | |
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47
salons
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|
| n.（营业性质的）店( salon的名词复数 )；厅；沙龙（旧时在上流社会女主人家的例行聚会或聚会场所）；（大宅中的）客厅 | |
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48
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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49
cardinal
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| n.(天主教的)红衣主教；adj.首要的，基本的 | |
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50
diplomat
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| n.外交官，外交家；能交际的人，圆滑的人 | |
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51
scouting
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| 守候活动，童子军的活动 | |
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52
supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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53
foresight
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| n.先见之明，深谋远虑 | |
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54
mechanism
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|
| n.机械装置；机构，结构 | |
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55
worthy
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|
| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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56
almighty
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|
| adj.全能的，万能的；很大的，很强的 | |
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57
disseminated
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| 散布，传播( disseminate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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58
disseminate
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| v.散布；传播 | |
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59
partisan
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|
| adj.党派性的；游击队的；n.游击队员；党徒 | |
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60
microscopic
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|
| adj.微小的，细微的，极小的，显微的 | |
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61
molecules
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| 分子( molecule的名词复数 ) | |
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62
fungi
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| n.真菌，霉菌 | |
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63
intestinal
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|
| adj.肠的；肠壁；肠道细菌 | |
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64
investigations
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|
| （正式的）调查( investigation的名词复数 )； 侦查； 科学研究； 学术研究 | |
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65
eels
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| abbr. 电子发射器定位系统（=electronic emitter location system） | |
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66
secondly
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| adv.第二，其次 | |
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67
cork
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| n.软木，软木塞 | |
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68
porous
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| adj.可渗透的，多孔的 | |
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69
infusions
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| n.沏或泡成的浸液（如茶等）( infusion的名词复数 )；注入，注入物 | |
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70
virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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71
gravy
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| n.肉汁；轻易得来的钱，外快 | |
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72
regenerated
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| v.新生，再生( regenerate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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73
physicists
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| 物理学家( physicist的名词复数 ) | |
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74
physicist
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| n.物理学家，研究物理学的人 | |
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75
triumphantly
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| ad.得意洋洋地；得胜地；成功地 | |
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76
philosophic
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|
| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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77
conclusive
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|
| adj.最后的，结论的；确凿的，消除怀疑的 | |
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78
doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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79
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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80
domain
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| n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围 | |
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81
elucidating
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|
| v.阐明，解释( elucidate的现在分词 ) | |
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82
vexed
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|
| adj.争论不休的；（指问题等）棘手的；争论不休的问题；烦恼的v.使烦恼( vex的过去式和过去分词 )；使苦恼；使生气；详细讨论 | |
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83
atmospheric
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|
| adj.大气的，空气的；大气层的；大气所引起的 | |
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84
experimentation
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|
| n.实验，试验，实验法 | |
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85
albeit
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| conj.即使；纵使；虽然 | |
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86
extremities
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|
| n.端点( extremity的名词复数 )；尽头；手和足；极窘迫的境地 | |
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87
lodge
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|
| v.临时住宿，寄宿，寄存，容纳；n.传达室，小旅馆 | |
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88
attic
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| n.顶楼，屋顶室 | |
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89
tenacious
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|
| adj.顽强的，固执的，记忆力强的，粘的 | |
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90
detritus
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| n.碎石 | |
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91
spore
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|
| n.(无花植物借以繁殖的)孢子，芽胞 | |
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92
spores
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| n.（细菌、苔藓、蕨类植物）孢子( spore的名词复数 )v.（细菌、苔藓、蕨类植物）孢子( spore的第三人称单数 ) | |
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93
immediate
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|
| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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94
alteration
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|
| n.变更，改变；蚀变 | |
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95
attained
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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96
ozone
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|
| n.臭氧，新鲜空气 | |
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97
magnetism
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| n.磁性，吸引力，磁学 | |
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98
conditional
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| adj.条件的，带有条件的 | |
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99
grandiloquently
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100
anonymous
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| adj.无名的；匿名的；无特色的 | |
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101
disciple
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| n.信徒，门徒，追随者 | |
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102
primordial
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|
| adj.原始的；最初的 | |
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103
drawn
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|
| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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104
flask
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| n.瓶，火药筒，砂箱 | |
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105
flasks
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| n.瓶，长颈瓶， 烧瓶( flask的名词复数 ) | |
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106
vessel
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| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
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107
dense
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| a.密集的，稠密的，浓密的；密度大的 | |
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108
dissemination
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| 传播,宣传,传染(病毒) | |
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109
sterile
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| adj.不毛的，不孕的，无菌的，枯燥的，贫瘠的 | |
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110
fecund
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|
| adj.多产的，丰饶的，肥沃的 | |
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111
vessels
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| n.血管( vessel的名词复数 )；船；容器；（具有特殊品质或接受特殊品质的）人 | |
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112
incapable
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|
| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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113
eminently
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| adv.突出地；显著地；不寻常地 | |
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114
corrupted
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| （使）败坏( corrupt的过去式和过去分词 )； （使）腐化； 引起（计算机文件等的）错误； 破坏 | |
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115
yeast
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|
| n.酵母；酵母片；泡沫；v.发酵；起泡沫 | |
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116
vertical
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| adj.垂直的，顶点的，纵向的；n.垂直物，垂直的位置 | |
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117
pointed
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| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
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118
partisans
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| 游击队员( partisan的名词复数 )； 党人； 党羽； 帮伙 | |
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119
adversaries
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| n.对手，敌手( adversary的名词复数 ) | |
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120
extremity
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| n.末端，尽头；尽力；终极；极度 | |
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121
observatory
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| n.天文台，气象台，瞭望台，观测台 | |
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122
utilize
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| vt.使用，利用 | |
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123
ferments
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| n.酵素( ferment的名词复数 )；激动；骚动；动荡v.（使）发酵( ferment的第三人称单数 )；（使）激动；骚动；骚扰 | |
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124
penetrating
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|
| adj.（声音）响亮的，尖锐的adj.（气味）刺激的adj.（思想）敏锐的，有洞察力的 | |
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125
dwelling
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| n.住宅，住所，寓所 | |
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126
ascent
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| n.(声望或地位)提高；上升，升高；登高 | |
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127
mule
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| n.骡子，杂种，执拗的人 | |
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128
precipice
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| n.悬崖，危急的处境 | |
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129
precipices
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| n.悬崖，峭壁( precipice的名词复数 ) | |
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130
inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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131
glacier
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| n.冰川，冰河 | |
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132
alterations
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| n.改动( alteration的名词复数 )；更改；变化；改变 | |
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133
investigators
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| n.调查者，审查者( investigator的名词复数 ) | |
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134
putrefaction
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| n.腐坏，腐败 | |
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135
gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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136
favourable
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|
| adj.赞成的，称赞的，有利的，良好的，顺利的 | |
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137
populous
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| adj.人口稠密的，人口众多的 | |
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138
unison
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| n.步调一致，行动一致 | |
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139
strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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140
animated
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| adj.生气勃勃的，活跃的，愉快的 | |
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141
hampered
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| 妨碍，束缚，限制( hamper的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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142
inevitable
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|
| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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143
transformation
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| n.变化；改造；转变 | |
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144
cylindric
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|
| adj.圆筒的，圆柱状的 | |
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145
opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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146
vacancy
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| n.（旅馆的）空位，空房，（职务的）空缺 | |
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147
botanist
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| n.植物学家 | |
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148
versatility
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| n.多才多艺，多样性，多功能 | |
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149
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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150
treatise
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| n.专著；(专题)论文 | |
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151
components
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| （机器、设备等的）构成要素，零件，成分； 成分( component的名词复数 )； [物理化学]组分； [数学]分量； （混合物的）组成部分 | |
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152
appreciation
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| n.评价；欣赏；感谢；领会，理解；价格上涨 | |
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153
inaccurate
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| adj.错误的，不正确的，不准确的 | |
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154
suffrage
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| n.投票，选举权，参政权 | |
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155
witty
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| adj.机智的，风趣的 | |
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156
scruples
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| n.良心上的不安( scruple的名词复数 )；顾虑，顾忌v.感到于心不安，有顾忌( scruple的第三人称单数 ) | |
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157
botanists
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| n.植物学家，研究植物的人( botanist的名词复数 ) | |
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158
fungus
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| n.真菌，真菌类植物 | |
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159
acetic
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| adj.酸的 | |
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160
interpretations
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| n.解释( interpretation的名词复数 )；表演；演绎；理解 | |
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161
combustion
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| n.燃烧；氧化；骚动 | |
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162
encumbered
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| v.妨碍，阻碍，拖累( encumber的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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163
corpses
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| n.死尸，尸体( corpse的名词复数 ) | |
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164
disciples
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| n.信徒( disciple的名词复数 )；门徒；耶稣的信徒；（尤指）耶稣十二门徒之一 | |
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165
faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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166
dedicated
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| adj.一心一意的；献身的；热诚的 | |
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167
insomnia
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| n.失眠，失眠症 | |
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168
esteem
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| n.尊敬，尊重；vt.尊重，敬重；把…看作 | |
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169
hitch
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| v.免费搭(车旅行)；系住；急提；n.故障；急拉 | |
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170
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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171
orientation
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| n.方向，目标；熟悉，适应，情况介绍 | |
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172
inverted
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| adj.反向的，倒转的v.使倒置，使反转( invert的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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173
murmurs
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| n.低沉、连续而不清的声音( murmur的名词复数 )；低语声；怨言；嘀咕 | |
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174
maker
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| n.制造者，制造商 | |
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175
dissuade
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| v.劝阻，阻止 | |
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176
meddle
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| v.干预，干涉，插手 | |
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177
deferential
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| adj. 敬意的，恭敬的 | |
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178
confession
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| n.自白，供认，承认 | |
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179
intercourse
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| n.性交；交流，交往，交际 | |
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180
probity
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| n.刚直；廉洁，正直 | |
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181
beacons
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| 灯塔( beacon的名词复数 )； 烽火； 指路明灯； 无线电台或发射台 | |
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182
oratorical
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| adj.演说的，雄辩的 | |
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183
improvisation
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| n.即席演奏(或演唱)；即兴创作 | |
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184
hurling
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| n.爱尔兰式曲棍球v.猛投，用力掷( hurl的现在分词 )；大声叫骂 | |
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185
suffrages
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| （政治性选举的）选举权，投票权( suffrage的名词复数 ) | |
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186
cemetery
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| n.坟墓，墓地，坟场 | |
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187
persevered
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| v.坚忍，坚持( persevere的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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188
soften
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| v.(使)变柔软；(使)变柔和 | |
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189
afflicted
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| 使受痛苦，折磨( afflict的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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190
applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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191
insistence
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| n.坚持；强调；坚决主张 | |
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192
putrid
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| adj.腐臭的；有毒的；已腐烂的；卑劣的 | |
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193
contagious
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| adj.传染性的，有感染力的 | |
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194
apparatus
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| n.装置，器械；器具，设备 | |
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195
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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196
fatigue
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| n.疲劳，劳累 | |
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197
chaos
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| n.混乱，无秩序 | |
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198
glaciers
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| 冰河，冰川( glacier的名词复数 ) | |
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199
perilous
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| adj.危险的，冒险的 | |
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200
devoid
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| adj.全无的，缺乏的 | |
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201
incessant
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| adj.不停的，连续的 | |
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202
fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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203
adjourn
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| v.（使）休会，（使）休庭 | |
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204
theatrical
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| adj.剧场的，演戏的；做戏似的，做作的 | |
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205
celebrities
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| n.（尤指娱乐界的）名人( celebrity的名词复数 )；名流；名声；名誉 | |
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206
lasting
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| adj.永久的，永恒的；vbl.持续，维持 | |
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207
insinuating
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| adj.曲意巴结的，暗示的v.暗示( insinuate的现在分词 )；巧妙或迂回地潜入；（使）缓慢进入；慢慢伸入 | |
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208
suspense
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| n.（对可能发生的事）紧张感，担心，挂虑 | |
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209
unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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210
eternity
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| n.不朽，来世；永恒，无穷 | |
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211
conscientious
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| adj.审慎正直的，认真的，本着良心的 | |
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212
limpid
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| adj.清澈的，透明的 | |
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213
distilled
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| adj.由蒸馏得来的v.蒸馏( distil的过去式和过去分词 )；从…提取精华 | |
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214
flakes
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| 小薄片( flake的名词复数 )； （尤指）碎片； 雪花； 古怪的人 | |
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215
noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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216
awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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217
solicitude
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| n.焦虑 | |
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218
aggravate
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| vt.加重(剧)，使恶化；激怒，使恼火 | |
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219
injustice
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| n.非正义，不公正，不公平，侵犯（别人的）权利 | |
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220
ministry
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| n.(政府的)部；牧师 | |
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221
nomination
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| n.提名，任命，提名权 | |
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222
tenacity
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| n.坚韧 | |
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223
ripened
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| v.成熟，使熟( ripen的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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224
incitement
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| 激励； 刺激； 煽动； 激励物 | |
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225
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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226
collaborating
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| 合作( collaborate的现在分词 )； 勾结叛国 | |
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227
determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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228
unwilling
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| adj.不情愿的 | |
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229
retired
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| adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的 | |
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230
repudiating
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| v.（正式地）否认( repudiate的现在分词 )；拒绝接受；拒绝与…往来；拒不履行（法律义务） | |
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231
arbiters
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| 仲裁人，裁决者( arbiter的名词复数 ) | |
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232
condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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233
arena
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| n.竞技场，运动场所；竞争场所，舞台 | |
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234
invincible
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| adj.不可征服的，难以制服的 | |
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235
solely
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| adv.仅仅，唯一地 | |
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236
defender
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| n.保卫者，拥护者，辩护人 | |
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237
atheism
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| n.无神论，不信神 | |
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238
materialism
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| n.［哲］唯物主义，唯物论；物质至上 | |
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239
blindfolded
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| v.（尤指用布）挡住（某人）的视线( blindfold的过去式 )；蒙住（某人）的眼睛；使不理解；蒙骗 | |
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240
philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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241
ardent
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，强烈的，烈性的 | |
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242
hostilities
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| n.战争；敌意(hostility的复数)；敌对状态；战事 | |
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243
irony
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| n.反语，冷嘲；具有讽刺意味的事，嘲弄 | |
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244
haughty
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| adj.傲慢的，高傲的 | |
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245
scrupulous
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| adj.审慎的，小心翼翼的，完全的，纯粹的 | |
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246
preoccupied
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| adj.全神贯注的，入神的；被抢先占有的；心事重重的v.占据（某人）思想，使对…全神贯注，使专心于( preoccupy的过去式) | |
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247
solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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248
meditations
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| 默想( meditation的名词复数 )； 默念； 沉思； 冥想 | |
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249
regain
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| vt.重新获得，收复，恢复 | |
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250
multiplication
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| n.增加，增多，倍增；增殖，繁殖；乘法 | |
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251
acidity
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| n.酸度，酸性 | |
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252
rosy
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| adj.美好的，乐观的，玫瑰色的 | |
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253
tawny
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| adj.茶色的，黄褐色的；n.黄褐色 | |
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254
impromptu
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| adj.即席的，即兴的；adv.即兴的(地)，无准备的(地) | |
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255
generosity
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| n.大度，慷慨，慷慨的行为 | |
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256
contented
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| adj.满意的，安心的，知足的 | |
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257
primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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258
parasitic
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| adj.寄生的 | |
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259
vitality
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| n.活力，生命力，效力 | |
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260
parasites
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| 寄生物( parasite的名词复数 )； 靠他人为生的人； 诸虫 | |
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261
ascertained
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| v.弄清，确定，查明( ascertain的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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262
jealousies
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| n.妒忌( jealousy的名词复数 )；妒羡 | |
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263
devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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264
obstinacy
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| n.顽固；（病痛等）难治 | |
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