Never was more cruel rebuff given to the generous efforts of a policy of sentiment: after having laid the foundation of the independence and unity7 of Italy, France had sympathized with Germany’s desire for unity, and few of the counsellors, or even the adversaries8 of the Empire, would not have defended this idea, which was supposed to lead to civilization. During that period of anxious waiting (beginning of July, 1870), when the most alarming news was daily published in Strasburg, it did not occur to any one to look back upon quotations9 from papers only a few years old, though in that very town a pamphlet might have been found, written by Edmond About in 1860, and containing the following words—
“Let Germany become united! France has no dearer or more ardent10 desire, for she loves the German nation with a disinterested11 friendship. France is not alarmed at seeing the formation of an Italian nation of 26,000,000 men in the South; she need not fear to see 32,000,000 Germans found a great people on the Eastern frontier.”
Proud to be first to proclaim the rights of nations; influenced by mingled12 feelings of kindliness13, trustfulness, optimism and a certain vanity of disinterestedness14, France, who loves to be loved, imagined that the world would be grateful for her{178} international sociability15, and that her smiles were sufficient to maintain peace and joy in Europe.
Far from being alarmed by certain symptoms in her neighbours, she voluntarily closed her eyes to the man?uvres of the Prussian troops, her ears to the roar of the artillery16 practice constantly heard across her eastern frontier; in 1863 patrols of German cavalry17 had come as far as Wissemburg. But people thought that Germany was “playing soldiers.” Duruy, who shared at that time the general delusion18, wrote in some traveller’s notes published in 1864: “We have had your German Rhine, and though you have garnished19 it with bristling20 fortresses21 and cannon23 turning France-wards, we do not wish to have it again, ... for the time for conquests is past. Conquests shall only now be made with the free consent of nations. Too much blood has been poured into the Rhine! What an immense people would arise if they who were struck down by the sword along its banks could be restored to life!”
After the thunderclap of Sadowa, the French Government, believing, in its infatuation, that it was entitled to a share of gratitude24 and security, asked for the land along the Rhine as far as Mayence; this territorial25 aggrandizement26 might have compensated27 for Prussia’s redoubtable28 conquests. The refusal was not long in coming. The Rhenish provinces immediately swarmed30 with Prussian troops. The Emperor, awaking from his dream, hesitating to make war, sent another proposition to Prussia: that the Rhenish provinces should become a buffer31 State. The same haughty32 answer was returned. France then hoped for the cession33 of Luxemburg, a hope all the more natural in that the populations of Luxemburg were willing to vote for annexation34 to France, and such a policy would have been in accordance with the rights of nations. But this request, apparently36 entertained at first by Prussia, was presently hampered37 by intrigues38 which caused its rejection39. Duped, not even treated as an arbiter40, but merely as a contemptible42 witness, France dazzled herself for a moment with the brilliant Exhibition of 1867. But it was a last and splendid flash; the word which is the bane of nations and of sovereigns, “to-morrow,” was on the lips of the ageing Emperor. The reform in the French army, which should have been bold and immediate29, was postponed44 and afterwards begun jerkily and unmethodically. Prussia however affected45 to be alarmed. Then irritation46 at having been duped, the evidence{179} of a growing peril47, a lingering hope in the military fortune of France—everything conspired48 to give an incident, provoked by Prussia, the proportions of a casus belli. But, in spite of so many grievances49, people did not yet believe in this sudden return to barbarism. The Imperial policy had indeed been blindly inconsistent; after opening a wide prospect50 of unity before the German people it had been thought possible to say “No further than the Main,” as if the impetuous force of a popular movement could be arrested after once being started. France suddenly opened her eyes to her danger and to the failure of her policy. But if a noble sentiment of generosity51 had been mingled with the desire to increase her territory without shedding a drop of blood, she had had the honour of being in the vanguard of progress. Were great ideas of peace and human brotherhood53 about to be engulfed54 in a war which would throw Europe into an era of violence and brutality56?
Pasteur, profoundly saddened, could not bear to realize that his ideal of the peaceful and beneficent destiny of France was about to vanish; he left Strasburg—never to return to it—a prey57 to the most sombre thoughts.
When he returned to Paris, he met Sainte Claire Deville, who had come back from a scientific mission in Germany, and who had for the first time lost his brightness and optimism. The war appeared to him absolutely disastrous58. He had seen the Prussian army, redoubtable in its skilful59 organization, closing along the frontier; the invasion was certain, and there was nothing to stay it. Everything was lacking in France, even in arsenals60 like Strasburg. At Toul, on the second line of fortifications, so little attention was paid to defence that the Government had thought that the place could be used as a dép?t for the infantry61 and cavalry reserves, who could await there the order for crossing the Rhine.
“Ah! my lads, my poor lads!” said Sainte Claire Deville to his Ecole Normale students, “it is all up with us!” And he was seen, between two experiments, wiping his eyes with the comer of his laboratory apron62.
The students, with the ordinary confidence of youth, could not believe that an invasion should be so imminent63. However, in spite of the privilege which frees Normaliens from any military service in exchange for a ten years’ engagement at the University, they put patriotic64 duty above any future University appointments, and entered the ranks as private{180} soldiers. Those who had been favoured by being immediately incorporated in a battalion65 of chasseurs à pied the dép?t of which was at Vincennes, spent their last evening—their vigil as they called it—in the drawing-room of the sub-director of the Ecole, Bertin. Sainte Claire Deville and Pasteur were there, also Duruy, whose three sons had enlisted66. Pasteur’s son, aged67 eighteen, was also on the eve of his departure.
Every one of the students at the Ecole Normale enlisted, some as chasseurs à pied, some in a line regiment68, others with the marines, in the artillery, even with the franc tireurs. Pasteur wished to be enrolled69 in the garde nationale with Duruy and Bertin, but he had to be reminded that a half-paralysed man was unfit for service. After the departure of all the students, the Ecole Normale fell into the silence of deserted70 houses. M. Bouillier, the director, and Bertin decided71 to turn it into an ambulance, a sort of home for the Normaliens who were stationed in various quarters of Paris.
Pasteur, unable to serve his country except by his scientific researches, had the firm intention of continuing his work; but he was overwhelmed by the reverses which fell upon France, the idea of the bloodshed and of his invaded country oppressed him like a monomania.
“Do not stay in Paris,” Bertin said to him, echoed by Dr. Godélier. “You have no right to stay; you would be a useless mouth during the siege,” he added, almost cheerfully, earnestly desiring to see his friend out of harm’s way. Pasteur allowed himself to be persuaded, and started for Arbois on September 5, his heart aching for the sorrows of France.
Some notes and letters enable us to follow him there, in the daily detail of his life, amongst his books, his plans of future work, and now and then his outbursts of passionate72 grief. He tried to return to the books he loved, to feel over again the attraction of “all that is great and beautiful” to quote a favourite phrase. He read at that time Laplace’s Exposition du Système du Monde, and even copied out some fragments, general ideas, concurring73 with his own. The vision of a Galileo or a Newton rising through a series of inductions74 from “particular phenomena75 to others more far-reaching, and from those to the general laws of Nature,” on this earth, “itself so small a part of the solar system, and disappearing entirely76 in the immensity of the heavens, of which that system is but an unimportant corner,”—that vision enveloped77 Pasteur{181} with the twofold feeling with which every man must be imbued78: humility79 before the Great Mystery, and admiration80 for those who, raising a corner of the veil, prove that genius is divinely inspired. Such reading helped Pasteur through the sad time of anxious waiting, and he would repeat as in brighter days, “Laboremus.”
But sometimes, when he was sitting quietly with his wife and daughter, the trumpet81 call would sound, with which the Arbois crier preceded the proclaiming of news. Then everything was forgotten, the universal order of things of no account, and Pasteur’s anguished83 soul would concentrate itself on that imperceptible comer of the universe, France, his suffering country. He would go downstairs, mix with groups standing84 on the little bridge across the Cuisance, listen breathlessly to the official communication, and sadly go back to the room where the memories of his father only emphasized the painful contrast with the present time. In the most prominent place hung a large medallion of General Bonaparte, by the Franc-Comtois Huguenin, the habit of authority visible in the thin energetic face; then a larger effigy85 in bronzed plaster of Napoleon in profile, in a very simple uniform; by the mantelpiece a lithograph86 of the little King of Rome with his curly head; on the bookshelves, well within reach, books on the Great Epoch87, read over and over again by the old soldier who had died in the humble88 room which still reflected some of the Imperial glory.
That glory, that legend had enveloped the childhood and youth of Pasteur, who, as he advanced in life, still preserved the same enthusiasm. His imagination pictured the Emperor, calm in the midst of battles, or reviewing his troops surrounded by an escort of field marshals, entering as a sovereign a capital not his own, then overwhelmed by numbers at Waterloo, and finally condemned89 to exile and inactivity, and dying in a long drawn90 agony. Glorious or lugubrious91, those visions came back to him with poignant92 insistency93 in those days of September, 1870. What was Waterloo compared to Sedan! The departure for St. Helena had the grandeur94 of the end of an epic95; it seemed almost enviable by the side of that last episode of the Second Empire, when Napoleon III, vanquished96, spared by the death which he wooed, left Sedan by the Donchery road to enter the cottage where Bismarck was to inform him of the rendezvous97 given by the King of Prussia.
The Emperor had now but a shadow of power, having made{182} the Empress Regent before he left Paris; it was therefore not the sword of France, but his own, that he was about to surrender. But he thought he might hope that the King of Prussia would show clemency98 to the French army and people, having many times declared that he made war on the Emperor and not on France.
“Can it be credited,” said Bismarck, speaking afterwards of that interview, “that he actually believed in our generosity!” The chancellor99 added, speaking of that somewhat protracted100 tête-à-tête, “I felt as I used to in my youth, when my partner in a cotillon was a girl to whom I did not quite know what to say, and whom nobody would fetch away for a turn!”
Napoleon III and the King of Prussia met in the Chateau101 of Bellevue, in the neighbourhood of Sedan, opposite a peninsula henceforth known by the sad name of “Camp of Misery102.” The Emperor looked for the last time upon his 83,000 soldiers, disarmed103, starving, waiting in the mud for the Prussian escort which was to convey them as prisoners far beyond the Rhine. Wilhelm did not even pronounce the word peace.
Jules Favre, taking possession on September 6 of the department of Foreign Affairs, recalled to the diplomatic agents the fall of the Empire and the words of the King of Prussia; then in an unaccustomed outburst of eloquence104 exclaimed: “Does the King of Prussia wish to continue an impious struggle which will be as fatal to him as to us? Does he wish to give to the world in the nineteenth century the cruel spectacle of two nations destroying each other and forgetful of human feelings, of reason and of science, heaping up ruin and death? Let him then assume the responsibility before the world and before posterity105!” And then followed the celebrated106 phrase with which he has been violently and iniquitously107 reproached, and which expressed the unanimous sentiment of France: “We will not concede one inch of our territory nor a stone of our fortifications.”
Bismarck refused the interview Jules Favre asked of him (September 10), under the pretext108 that the new Government was irregular. The enemy was coming nearer and nearer to Paris. The French city was resolved to resist; thousands upon thousands of oxen were being corralled in the Bois de Boulogne; poor people from the suburbs were coming to take refuge in the city. On the Place de la Concorde, the statue which repre{183}sents the city of Strasburg was covered with flowers and flags, and seemed to incarnate110 the idea of the Patrie itself.
Articles and letters came to Arbois in that early September, bringing an echo of the sorrows of Paris. Pasteur was then reading the works of General Foy, wherein he found thoughts in accordance with his own, occasionally copying out such passages as the following: “Right and Might struggle for the world; Right, which constitutes and preserves Society; Might, which overcomes nations and bleeds them to death.”
General Foy fought for France during twenty-five years, and, writing in 1820, recalled with a patriotic shudder111 the horrors of foreign invasions. Long after peace was signed, by a chance meeting in a street in Paris, General Foy found himself face to face with Wellington. The sight was so odious112 to him that he spoke113 of this meeting in the Chambre with an accent of sorrowful humiliation114 which breathed the sadness of Waterloo over the whole assembly. Pasteur could well understand the long continued vibration115 of that suffering chord, he, who never afterwards could speak without a thrill of sorrow of that war which Germany, in defiance116 of humanity, was inexcusably pursuing.
It was the fourth time in less than a hundred years that a Prussian invasion overflowed117 into France. But instead of 42,000 Prussians, scattered118 in 1792 over the sacred soil of the Patrie—Pasteur pronounced the word with the faith and tenderness of a true son of France—there were now 518,000 men to fight 285,000 French.
The thought that they had been armed in secret for the conquest of neighbouring lands, the memory of France’s optimism until that diplomatic incident, invented so that France might stumble over it, and the inaction of Europe, inspired Pasteur with reflections which he confided120 to his pupil Raulin. “What folly121, what blindness,” he wrote (September 17), “there are in the inertia122 of Austria, Russia, England! What ignorance in our army leaders of the respective forces of the two nations! We savants were indeed right when we deplored124 the poverty of the department of Public Instruction! The real cause of our misfortunes lies there. It is not with impunity—as it will one day be recognized, too late—that a great nation is allowed to lose its intellectual standard. But, as you say, if we rise again from those disasters, we shall again see our statesmen lose themselves in endless{184} discussions on forms of government and abstract political questions instead of going to the root of the matter. We are paying the penalty of fifty years’ forgetfulness of science, of its conditions of development, of its immense influence on the destiny of a great people, and of all that might have assisted the diffusion126 of light.... I cannot go on, all this hurts me. I try to put away all such memories, and also the sight of our terrible distress127, in which it seems that a desperate resistance is the only hope we have left. I wish that France may fight to her last man, to her last fortress22. I wish that the war may be prolonged until the winter, when, the elements aiding us, all these Vandals may perish of cold and distress. Every one of my future works will bear on its title page the words: ‘Hatred128 to Prussia. Revenge! revenge!’”
There is a passage in the Psalms129 where the captives of Israel, led to Babylonian rivers, weep at the memory of Jerusalem. After swearing never to forget their country, they wish their enemies every misfortune, and hurl131 this last imprecation at Babylon: “Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children and throweth them against the stones.”[29] One of the most Christlike souls of our time, Henri Perreyve, speaking of Poland, of vanquished and oppressed nations, quoted this Psalm130 and exclaimed: “O Anger, man’s Anger, how difficult it is to drive thee out of man’s heart! and how irresistible132 are the flames kindled133 by the insolence134 of injustice135!” Those flames were kindled in the soul of Pasteur, full as it was of human tenderness, and they burst out in that sobbing136 cry of despair.
On that 17th of September, the day before Paris was invested, Jules Favre made another attempt to obtain peace. He published an account of that interview which took place at the Chateau of Ferrières, near Meaux; this printed account reached every town in France, and was read with grief and anger.
Jules Favre had deluded137 himself into thinking that victorious139 Prussia would limit its demands to a war indemnity140, probably a formidable one. But Bismarck, besides the indemnity, intended to take a portion of French soil, and claimed Strasburg first of all. “It is the key of the house; I must have it.” And with Strasburg he wanted the whole Department of the Haut-Rhin, that of the Bas-Rhin, Metz, and a part of the Department of Moselle. Jules Favre, character{185}istically French, exhausted141 his eloquence in putting sentiment into politics, spoke of European rights, of the right of the people to dispose of themselves, tried to bring out the fact that a brutal55 annexation was in direct opposition142 to the progress of civilization. “I know very well,” said Bismarck, “that they (meaning the Alsatians and Lorrainers) do not want us; they will give us a deal of trouble, but we must annex35 them.” In the event of a future war Prussia was to have the advantage. All this was said with an authoritative143 courtesy, an insolent144 tranquillity145, through which contempt for men was visible, evidently the best means of governing them in Bismarck’s eyes. As Jules Favre was pleading the cause of heroic Strasburg, whose long resistance was the admiration of Paris, “Strasburg will now fall into our hands,” said Bismarck coldly; “it is but a question for engineers; therefore I request that the garrison146 should surrender as prisoners of war.”
Jules Favre “leapt in his grief”—the words are his—but King Wilhelm exacted this condition. Jules Favre, almost breaking down, turning away to hide the tears that welled into his eyes, ended the interview with these words: “It is an indefinite struggle between two nations who should go hand in hand.”
Traces of this patriotic anguish82 are to be found in one of Pasteur’s notebooks, as well as a circular addressed by Jules Favre to the diplomatic representatives in answer to certain points disputed by Bismarck. Pasteur admiringly took note of the following passage: “I know not what destinies Fate has in store for us. But I do feel most deeply that if I had to choose between the present situation of France and that of Prussia, I should decide for the former. Better far our sufferings, our perils147, our sacrifices, than the cruel and inflexible148 ambition of our foe149.”
“We must preserve hope until the end,” wrote Pasteur after reading the above, “say nothing to discourage each other, and wish ardently150 for a prolonged struggle. Let us think of hopeful things; Bazaine may save us.”... How many French hearts were sharing that hope at the very time when Bazaine was preparing to betray Metz, his troops and his flag!
“Should we not cry: ‘Happy are the dead!’” wrote Pasteur a few days after the news burst upon France of that army lost without being allowed to fight, of that city of Metz, the strongest in France, surrendered without a struggle!
Through all Pasteur’s anxieties about the war, certain obser{186}vations, certain projected experiments resounded151 in his mind like the hours that a clock strikes, unheeded but not unheard, in a house visited by death. He could not put them away from him, they were part of his very life.
Any sort of laboratory work was difficult for him in the tanner’s house, which had remained the joint153 property of himself and his sister. His brother-in-law had continued Joseph Pasteur’s trade. Pasteur applied154 his spirit of observation to everything around him, and took the opportunity of studying the fermentation of tan. He would ask endless questions, trying to discover the scientific reason of every process and every routine. Whilst his sister was making bread he would study the raising of the crust, the influence of air in the kneading of the dough156, and his imagination rising as usual from a minor157 point to the greatest problems, he began to seek for a means of increasing the nutritive powers of bread, and consequently of lowering its price.
The Salut Public of December 20 contained a notice on that very subject, which Pasteur transcribed158. The Central Commission of Hygiene159 which included among its members Sainte Claire Deville, Wurtz, Bouchardat and Trélat, had tried, when dealing160 with this question of bread (a vital one during the siege), to prove to the Parisians that bread is the more wholesome161 for containing a little bran. “With what emotion,” wrote Pasteur, “I have just read all those names dear to science, greater now before their fellow-citizens and before posterity. Why could I not share their sufferings and their dangers!” He would have added “and their work” if some of the Académie des Sciences reports had reached him.
The history of the Academy during the war is worthy162 of brief mention. Moreover it was too deeply interesting to Pasteur, too constantly in his thoughts, not to be considered as forming part of his biography.
During the first period, the Academy, imagining, like the rest of France, that there was no doubt of a favourable163 issue of the war, continued its purely164 scientific task. When the first defeats were announced, the habitual165 communications ceased, and the Academy, unable to think of anything but the war, held sittings of three-quarters of an hour or even less.
One of the correspondents of the Institute, the surgeon Sédillot, who was in Alsace at the head of an ambulance corps166, and who himself performed as many as fifteen amputations in{187} one day, addressed two noteworthy letters to the President of the Academy. Those letters mark a date in the history of surgery, and show how restricted was then in France the share of some of Pasteur’s ideas at the very time when in other countries they were adopted and followed. Lister, the celebrated English surgeon, having, he said, meditated168 on Pasteur’s theory of germs, and proclaimed himself his follower169, convinced that complications and infection of wounds were caused by their giving access to living organisms and infectious germs, elements of trouble, often of death, had already in 1867 inaugurated a method of treatment. He attempted the destruction of germs floating in air by means of a vaporizer filled with a carbolic solution, then isolated171 and preserved the wound from the contact of the air. Sponges, drainage tubes, etc., were subjected to minute precautions; in one word, he created antisepsis. Four months before the war he had propounded172 the principles which should guide surgeons, but it occurred to no one in France, in the first battles, to apply the new method. “The horrible mortality amongst the wounded in battle,” writes Sédillot, “calls for the attention of all the friends of science and humanity. The surgeon’s art, hesitating and disconcerted, pursues a doctrine173 whose rules seem to flee before research.... Places where there are wounded are recognizable by the fetor of suppuration and gangrene.”
Hundreds and thousands of wounded, their faces pale, but full of hope and desire to live, succumbed174 between the eighth and tenth day to gangrene and erysipelas. Those failures of the surgery of the past are plain to us now that the doctrine of germs has explained everything; but, at that time, such an avowal175 of impotence before the mysterious contagium sui generis, which, the doctors averred176, eluded138 all research, and such awful statistics of mortality embittered the anguish of defeat.
The Academy then attempted to take a share in the national co-operation by making a special study of any subject which interested the public health and defence. A sitting on methods of steering177 balloons was succeeded by another on various means of preserving meat during the siege. Then came an anxious inquiry178 into modes of alimentation of infants. At the end of October there were but 20,000 litres of milk per day to be procured179 in the whole of Paris, and the healthy were implored180 to abstain181 from it. It was a question of life and death for young{188} children, and already many little coffins182 were daily to be seen on the road to the cemetery184.
Thus visions of death amongst soldiers in their prime and children in their infancy185 hung over the Academy meeting hall. It was at one of those mournful sittings, on a dark autumn afternoon, that Chevreul, an octogenarian member of the Institute, who, like Pasteur, had believed in civilization and in the binding186 together of nations through science, art and letters, looking at the sacks of earth piled outside the windows to save the library from the bursting shells, exclaimed in loud desolate187 tones—
“And yet we are in the nineteenth century, and a few months ago the French did not even think of a war which has put their capital into a state of siege and traced around its walls a desert zone where he who sowed does not reap! And there are public universities where they teach the Beautiful, the True, and the Right.”
“Might goes before Right,” Bismarck said. A German journalist invented another phrase which went the round of Europe: “the psychological moment for bombardment.” On January 5, one of the first Prussian shells sank into the garden of the Ecole Normale; another burst in the very ambulance of the Ecole. Bertin, the sub-director, rushed through the suffocating188 smoke and ascertained189 that none of the patients was hurt; he found the breech between two beds. The miserable190 patients dragged themselves downstairs to the lecture rooms on the ground floor, not a much safer refuge.
From the heights of Chatillon the enemy’s batteries were bombarding all the left bank of the Seine, the Prussians, regardless of the white flags bearing the red cross of Geneva, were aiming at the Val-de-Grace and the Panthéon. “Where is the Germany of our dreams?” wrote Paul de St. Victor on January 9, “the Germany of the poets? Between her and France an abyss of hatred has opened, a Rhine of blood and tears that no peace can ever bridge over.”
On that same date, Chevreul read the following declaration to the Academy of Science—
The Garden of Medicinal Plants, founded in Paris
by an edict of King Louis XIII,
dated January, 1826,
{189}Converted into the Museum of Natural History
by a decree of the Convention on June 10, 1793,
was Bombarded,
Prussia, Count von Bismarck, Chancellor,
by the Prussian army, during the night
of January 8-9, 1871.
It had until then been respected by all parties
and all powers, national or
foreign.
Pasteur, on reading this protest, regretted more than ever that he had not been there to sign it. It then occurred to him that he too might give vent119 to the proud plaint of the vanquished from his little house at Arbois. He remembered with a sudden bitterness the diploma he had received from the University of Bonn. Many years had passed since the time in the First Empire when one of the 110 French Departments had been that of Rhine and Moselle, with Coblentz as its préfecture and Bonn and Zimmern as sous-préfectures. When, in 1815, Prussia’s iron hand seized again those Rhenish provinces which had become so French at heart, the Prussian king and his ministers hit upon the highly politic125 idea of founding a University on the picturesque191 banks of the Rhine, thus morally conquering the people after reducing them by force. That University had been a great success and had become most prosperous. The Strasburg Faculty under the Second Empire, with its few professors and its general penury192, seemed very poor compared to the Bonn University, with its fifty-three professors and its vast laboratories of chemistry, physics and medicine, and even a museum of antiquities193. Pasteur and Duruy had often exchanged remarks on that subject. But that rivalry between the two Faculties194 was of a noble nature, animated195 as it was by the great feeling that science is superior to national distinctions. King Wilhelm had once said, “Prussia’s conquests must be of the moral kind,” and Pasteur had not thought of any other conquests.
When in 1868 the University of Bonn conferred upon him the diploma of Doctor of Medicine, saying that “by his very penetrating196 experiments, he had much contributed to the knowledge of the history of the generation of micro-organisms, and had happily advanced the progress of the science of fermentations,” he had been much pleased at this acknowledgment of{190} the future opened to medical studies by his work, and he was proud to show the Degree he had received.
“Now,” he wrote (January 18, 1871), to the Head of the Faculty of Medicine, after recalling his former sentiments, “now the sight of that parchment is odious to me, and I feel offended at seeing my name, with the qualification of Virum clarissimum that you have given it, placed under a name which is henceforth an object of execration197 to my country, that of Rex Gulielmus.
“While highly asseverating198 my profound respect for you, Sir, and for the celebrated professors who have affixed199 their signatures to the decision of the members of your Order, I am called upon by my conscience to ask you to efface201 my name from the archives of your Faculty, and to take back that diploma, as a sign of the indignation inspired in a French scientist by the barbarity and hypocrisy202 of him who, in order to satisfy his criminal pride, persists in the massacre203 of two great nations.” Pasteur’s protest ended with these words—
“Written at Arbois (Jura) on January 18, 1871, after reading the mark of infamy204 inscribed205 on the forehead of your King by the illustrious director of the Museum of Natural History M. Chevreul.”
“This letter will not have much weight with a people whose principles differ so totally from those that inspire us,” said Pasteur, “but it will at least echo the indignation of French scientists.”
He made a collection of stories, of episodes, and letters, which fell in his way; amongst other things we find an open letter from General Chanzy to the commandant of the Prussian troops at Vend206?me, denouncing the insults, outrages207, and inexcusable violence of the Prussians towards the inhabitants of St. Calais, who had shown great kindness to the enemy’s sick and wounded.
“You respond by insolence, destruction and pillage208 to the generosity with which we treat your prisoners and wounded. I indignantly protest, in the name of humanity and of the rights of men, which you trample209 under foot.”
Pasteur also gathered up tales of bravery, of heroism210, and of resignation—that form of heroism so often illustrated211 by women—during the terrible siege of Paris. And, from all those things, arose the psychology212 of war in its two aspects: in the invading army a spirit of conquest carried to oppression, and even apart{191} from the thrilling moments of battle, giving to hatred and cruelty a cold-blooded sanction of discipline; in the vanquished nation, an irrepressible revolt, an intoxication213 of sacrifice. Those who have not seen war do not know what love of the mother country means.
France was the more loved that she was more oppressed; she inspired her true sons with an infinite tenderness. Sully-Prudhomme, the poet of pensive214 youth, renouncing215 his love for Humanity in general, promised himself that he would henceforth devote his life to the exclusive love of France. A greater poet than he, Victor Hugo, wrote at that time the first part of his Année Terrible, with its mingled devotion and despair.
The death of Henri Regnault was one of the sad episodes of the war. This brilliant young painter—he was only twenty-seven years of age—enlisted as a garde nationale, though exempt216 by law from any military service through being a laureate of the prix de Rome.[30] He did his duty valiantly217, and on January 19, at the last sortie attempted by the Parisians, at Buzenval, the last Prussian shot struck him in the forehead. The Académie des Sciences, at its sitting of January 23, rendered homage218 to him whose coffin183 enclosed such dazzling prospects219 and some of the glory of France. The very heart of Paris was touched, and a great sadness was felt at the funeral procession of the great artist who seemed an ideal type of all the youth and talent so heroically sacrificed—and all in vain—for the surrender of Paris had just been officially announced.
Regnault’s father, the celebrated physicist220, a member of the Institute, was at Geneva when he received this terrible blow. Another grief—not however comparable to the despair of a bereaved221 parent—befell him—an instance of the odious side of war, not in its horrors, its pools of blood and burnt dwellings222, but in its premeditated cruelty. Regnault had left his laboratory utensils223 in his rooms at the Sèvres porcelain224 manufactory, of which he was the manager. Everything was apparently left in the same place, not a window was broken, no locks forced; but a Prussian, evidently an expert, had been there. “Nothing seemed changed,” writes J. B. Dumas, “in that abode225 of science, and yet everything was destroyed; the glass tubes of barometers226, thermometers, etc., were broken; scales{192} and other similar instruments had been carefully knocked out of shape with a hammer.” In a corner was a heap of ashes; they were the registers, notes, manuscripts, all Regnault’s work of the last ten years. “Such cruelty,” exclaimed J. B. Dumas, “is unexampled in history. The Roman soldier who butchered Archimedes in the heat of the onslaught may be excused—he did not know him; but with what sacrilegious meanness could such a work of destruction as this be accomplished227!!!”
On the very day when the Académie des Sciences was condoling228 with Henri Regnault’s sorrowing father, Pasteur, anxious at having had no news of his son, who had been fighting before Héricourt, determined229 to go and look for him in the ranks of the Eastern Army Corps. By Poligny and Lons-le-Saulnier, the roads were full of stragglers from the various regiments230 left several days behind, their route completely lost, who begged for bread as they marched, barely covered by the tattered231 remnants of their uniforms. The main body of the army was on the way to Besan?on, a sad procession of French soldiers, hanging their heads under the cold grey sky and tramping painfully in the snow.
Bourbaki, the general-in-chief, a hero of African battlefields, was becoming more and more unnerved by the combinations of this war. Whilst the Minister, in a dispatch from Bordeaux, had ordered him to move back towards D?le, to prevent the taking of Dijon, then to hurry to Nevers or Joigny, where 20,000 men would be ready to be incorporated, Bourbaki, overwhelmed by the lamentable232 spectacle under his eyes, could see no resource for his corps but a last line of retreat, Pontarlier.
It was among that stream of soldiers that Pasteur attempted to find his son. His old friend and neighbour, Jules Vercel, saw him start, accompanied by his wife and daughter, on Tuesday, January 24, in a half broken down old carriage, the last that was left in the town. After journeying for some hours in the snow, the sad travellers spent the night in a little wayside inn near Montrond; the old carriage with its freight of travelling boxes stood on the roadside like a gipsy’s caravan233. The next morning they went on through a pine forest where the deep silence was unbroken save by the falling masses of snow from the spreading branches. They slept at Censeau, the next day at Chaffois, and it was only on the Friday that they reached Pontarlier, by roads made almost impracticable by the snow, the carriage now a mere41 wreck234.{193}
The town was full of soldiers, some crouching235 round fires in the street, others stepping across their dead horses and begging for a little straw to lie on. Many had taken refuge in the church and were lying on the steps of the altar; a few were attempting to bandage their frozen feet, threatened with gangrene.
Suddenly the news spread that the general-in-chief, Bourbaki, had shot himself through the brain. This did not excite much surprise. He had telegraphed two days before to the Minister of War: “You cannot have an idea of the sufferings that the army has endured since the beginning of December. It is martyrdom to be in command at such a time,” he added despairingly.
“The retreat from Moscow cannot have been worse than this,” said Pasteur to a staff officer, Commandant Bourboulon, a nephew of Sainte Claire Deville, whom he met in the midst of those horrors and who could give him no information as to his son’s battalion of Chasseurs. “All that I can tell you,” said a soldier anxiously questioned by Mme. Pasteur, “is that out of the 1,200 men of that battalion there are but 300 left.” As she was questioning another, a soldier who was passing stopped: “Sergeant236 Pasteur? Yes, he is alive; I slept by him last night at Chaffois. He has remained behind; he is ill. You might meet him on the road towards Chaffois.”
The Pasteurs started again on the road followed the day before. They had barely passed the Pontarlier gate when a rough cart came by. A soldier muffled237 in his great coat, his hands resting on the edge of the cart, started with surprise. He hurried down, and the family embraced without a word, so great was their emotion.
The capitulation of starving Paris and the proposed armistice238 are historical events still present in the memory of men who were then beginning to learn the meaning of defeat. The armistice, which Jules Favre thought would be applied without restriction239 to all the army corps, was interpreted by Bismarck in a peculiar240 way. He and Jules Favre between them had drawn up a protocol241 in general terms; it had been understood in those preliminary confabulations that, before drawing up the limits of the neutral zone applicable to the Eastern Army Corps, some missing information would be awaited, the respective positions of the belligerents242 being unknown. The information did not come, and Jules Favre in his imprudent{194} trustfulness supposed that the delimitation would be done on the spot by the officers in command. When he heard that the Prussian troops were continuing their march eastwards243, he complained to Bismarck, who answered that “the incident cannot have compromised the Eastern Army Corps, as it already was completely routed when the armistice was signed.” This calculated reserve on Bismarck’s part was eminently245 characteristic of his moral physiognomy, and this encounter between the two Ministers proved once again the inferiority—when great interests are at stake—of emotional men to hard-hearted business men; however it must be acknowledged that Bismarck’s statement was founded on fact. The Eastern Corps could have fought no more; its way was blocked. Without food, without clothes, in many cases without arms, nothing remained to the unfortunate soldiers but the refuge offered by Switzerland.
Pasteur went to Geneva with his son, who, after recovering from the illness caused by fatigue246 and privation, succeeded in getting back to France to rejoin his regiment in the early days of February. Pasteur then went on to Lyons and stayed there with his brother-in-law, M. Loir, Dean of the Lyons Faculty of Science. He intended to go back to Paris, but a letter from Bertin dated February 18 advised him to wait. “This is the present state of the Ecole: south wing: pulled down; will be built up again; workmen expected. Third year dormitory: ambulance occupied by eight students. Science dormitory and drawing classroom: ambulance again, forty patients. Ground floor classroom: 120 artillery-men. Pasteur laboratory: 210 gardes nationaux, refugees from Issy. You had better wait.” Bertin added, with his indomitable good humour, speaking of the bombardment: “The first day I did not go out, but I took my bearings and found the formula: in leaving the school, walk close along the houses on my left; on coming back, keep close to them on my right; with that I went out as usual. The population of Paris has shown magnificent resignation and patience.... In order to have our revenge, everything will have to be rebuilt from the top to the bottom, the top especially.”
Pasteur also thought that reforms should begin from the top. He prepared a paper dated from Lyons, and entitled “Why France found no superior men in the hours of peril.” Amongst the mistakes committed, one in particular had been before his mind for twenty years, ever since he left the Ecole Normale:{195} “The forgetfulness, disdain247 even, that France had had for great intellectual men, especially in the realm of exact science.” This seemed the more sad to him that things had been very different at the end of the eighteenth century. Pasteur enumerated248 the services rendered by science to his threatened country. If in 1792 France was able to face danger on all sides, it was because Lavoisier, Fourcroy, Guyton de Morveau, Chaptal, Berthollet, etc., discovered new means of extracting saltpetre and manufacturing gunpowder250; because Monge found a method of founding cannon with great rapidity; and because the chemist Clouet invented a quick system of manufacturing steel. Science, in the service of patriotism251, made a victorious army of a perturbed252 nation. If Marat, with his slanderous253 and injurious insinuations, had not turned from their course the feelings of the mob, Lavoisier never would have perished on the scaffold. The day after his execution, Lagrange said: “One moment was enough for his head to fall, and 200 years may not suffice to produce such another.” Monge and Berthollet, also denounced by Marat, nearly shared the same fate: “In a week’s time we shall be arrested, tried, condemned and executed,” said Berthollet placidly254 to Monge, who answered with equal composure, thinking only of the country’s defence, “All I know is that my gun factories are working admirably.”
Bonaparte, from the first, made of science what he would have made of everything—a means of reigning255. When he started for Egypt, he desired to have with him a staff of scientists, and Monge and Berthollet undertook to organize that distinguished256 company. Later, when Bonaparte became Napoleon I, he showed, in the intervals257 between his wars, so much respect for the place due to science as to proclaim the effacement258 of national rivalry when scientific discoveries were in question. Pasteur, when studying this side of the Imperial character, found in some pages by Arago on Monge that, after Waterloo, Napoleon, in a conversation he had with Monge at the Elysée, said, “Condemned now to command armies no longer, I can see but Science with which to occupy my mind and my soul....”
Alluding259 to the scientific supremacy260 of France during the early part of the nineteenth century, Pasteur wrote: “All the other nations acknowledged our superiority, though each could take pride in some great men: Berzelius in Sweden, Davy in England, Volta in Italy, other eminent244 men in Ger{196}many and Switzerland; but in no country were they as numerous as in France....” He added these regretful lines: “A victim of her political instability, France has done nothing to keep up, to propagate and to develop the progress of science in our country; she has merely obeyed a given impulse; she has lived on her past, thinking herself great by the scientific discoveries to which she owed her material prosperity, but not perceiving that she was imprudently allowing the sources of those discoveries to become dry, whilst neighbouring nations, stimulated261 by her past example, were diverting for their own benefit the course of those springs, rendering262 them fruitful by their works, their efforts and their sacrifices.
“Whilst Germany was multiplying her universities, establishing between them the most salutary emulation263, bestowing264 honours and consideration on the masters and doctors, creating vast laboratories amply supplied with the most perfect instruments, France, enervated265 by revolutions, ever vainly seeking for the best form of government, was giving but careless attention to her establishments for higher education....
“The cultivation266 of science in its highest expression is perhaps even more necessary to the moral condition than to the material prosperity of a nation.
“Great discoveries—the manifestations267 of thought in Art, in Science and in Letters, in a word the disinterested exercise of the mind in every direction and the centres of instruction from which it radiates, introduce into the whole of Society that philosophical269 or scientific spirit, that spirit of discernment, which submits everything to severe reasoning, condemns270 ignorance and scatters271 errors and prejudices. They raise the intellectual level and the moral sense, and through them the Divine idea itself is spread abroad and intensified272.”
At the very time when Pasteur was preoccupied273 with the desire of directing the public mind towards the principles of truth, justice and sovereign harmony, Sainte Claire Deville, speaking of the Academy, expressed similar ideas, proclaiming that France had been vanquished by science and that it was now time to free scientific bodies from the tyranny of red tape. Why should not the Academy become the centre of all measures relating to science, independently of government offices or officials?
J. B. Dumas took part in the discussion opened by Sainte Claire Deville, and agreed with his suggestions. He might{197} have said more, however, on a subject which he often took up in private: the utility of pure science in daily experience. With his own special gift of generalization274, he could have expounded275 the progress of all kinds due to the workers who, by their perseverance276 in resolving difficult problems, have brought about so many precious and unexpected results. Few men in France realized at that time that laboratories could be the vestibule of farms, factories, etc.; it was indeed a noble task, that of proving that science was intended to lighten the burden of humanity, not merely to be applied to devastation277, carnage, and hatred.
Pasteur was in the midst of these philosophical reflections when he received the following answer from the principal of the Faculty of Medicine of Bonn:
“Sir, the undersigned, now Principal of the Faculty of Medicine of Bonn, is requested to answer the insult which you have dared to offer to the German nation in the sacred person of its august Emperor, King Wilhelm of Prussia, by sending you the expression of its entire contempt.”—Dr. Maurice Naumann.
Pasteur’s reply contained the following: “I have the honour of informing you, Mr. Principal, that there are times when the expression of contempt in a Prussian mouth is equivalent for a true Frenchman to that of Virum clarissimum which you once publicly conferred upon me.”
After invoking280 in favour of Alsace-Lorraine, Truth, of Justice, and the laws of humanity, Pasteur added in a postscript281—
“And now, Mr. Principal, after reading over both your letter and mine, I sorrow in my heart to think that men who like yourself and myself have spent a lifetime in the pursuit of truth and progress, should address each other in such a fashion, founded on my part on such actions. This is but one of the results of the character your Emperor has given to this war. You speak to me of taint. Mr. Principal, taint will rest, you may be assured, until far-distant ages, on the memory of those who began the bombardment of Paris when capitulation by famine was inevitable282, and who continued this act of savagery283 after it had become evident to all men that it would not advance by one hour the surrender of the heroic city.{198}”
Whilst Pasteur thus felt those simple and strong impressions as a soldier or the man in the street might do, the creative power of his nature was urging him to great and useful achievements. He wrote from Lyons in March to M. Duclaux—
“My head is full of splendid projects; the war sent my brain to grass, but I now feel ready for further work. Perhaps I am deluding284 myself; anyhow I will try.... Oh! why am I not rich, a millionaire? I would say to you, to Raulin, to Gernez, to Van Tieghem, etc., come, we will transform the world by our discoveries. How fortunate you are to be young and strong! Why can I not begin a new life of study and work! Unhappy France, beloved country, if I could only assist in raising thee from thy disasters!”
A few days later, in a letter to Raulin, this desire for devoted285 work was again expressed almost feverishly286. He could foresee, in the dim distance, secret affinities288 between apparently dissimilar things. He had at that time returned to the researches which had absorbed his youth (because those studies were less materially difficult to organize), and he could perceive laws and connections between the facts he had observed and those of the existence of which he felt assured.
“I have begun here some experiments in crystallization which will open a great prospect if they should lead to positive results. You know that I believe that there is a cosmic dissymmetric influence which presides constantly and naturally over the molecular289 organization of principles immediately essential to life; and that, in consequence of this, the species of the three kingdoms, by their structure, by their form, by the disposition290 of their tissues, have a definite relation to the movements of the universe. For many of those species, if not for all, the sun is the primum movens of nutrition; but I believe in another influence which would affect the whole organization, for it would be the cause of the molecular dissymmetry proper to the chemical components291 of life. I want to be able by experiment to grasp a few indications as to the nature of this great cosmic dissymmetrical influence. It must, it may be electricity, magnetism292.... And, as one should always proceed from the simple to the complex, I am now trying to crystallize double racemate of soda293 and ammonia under the influence of a spiral solenoid.
“I have various other forms of experiment to attempt. If one of them should succeed, we shall have work for the rest of{199} our lives, and in one of the greatest subjects man could approach, for I should not despair of arriving by this means at a very deep, unexpected and extraordinary modification294 of the animal and vegetable species.
“Good-bye, my dear Raulin. Let us endeavour to distract our thoughts from human turpitudes by the disinterested search after truth.”
In a little notebook where he jotted295 down some intended experiments we find evidence of those glimpses of divination296 in a few summary lines: “Show that life is in the germ, that it has been but in a state of transmission since the origin of creation. That the germ possesses possibilities of development, either of intelligence and will, or—and in the same way—of physical organs. Compare these possibilities with those possessed297 by the germ of chemical species which is in the chemical molecule298. The possibilities of development in the germ of the chemical molecule consist in crystallization, in its form, in its physical and chemical properties. Those properties are in power in the germ of the molecule in the same way as the organs and tissues of animals and plants are in their respective germs. Add: nothing is more curious than to carry the comparison of living species with mineral species into the study of the wounds of either, and of their healing by means of nutrition—a nutrition coming from within in living beings, and from without through the medium of crystallization in the others. Here detail facts....”
In that same notebook, Pasteur, after writing down the following heading, “Letter to prepare on the species in connection with molecular dissymmetry,” added, “I could write that letter to Bernard. I should say that being deprived of a laboratory by the present state of France, I am going to give him the preconceived ideas that I shall try to experiment upon when better times come. There is no peril in expressing ideas a priori, when they are taken as such, and can be gradually modified, perhaps even completely transformed, according to the result of the observation of facts.”
He once compared those preconceived ideas with searchlights guiding the experimentalist, saying that they only became dangerous when they became fixed200 ideas.
Civil war had now come, showing, as Renan said, “a sore under the sore, an abyss below the abyss.” What were the hopes and projects of Pasteur and of Sainte Claire Deville now{200} that the very existence of the divided country was jeopardized299 under the eyes of the Prussians? The world of letters and of science, helpless amidst such disorders301, had dispersed302; Saint Claire Deville was at Gex, Dumas at Geneva. Some were wondering whether lectures could not be organized in Switzerland and in Belgium as they had been under the Empire, thus spreading abroad the influence of French thought. Examples might be quoted of men who had served the glory of their country in other lands, such as Descartes, who took refuge in Holland in order to continue his philosophic268 meditations304. Pasteur might have been tempted170 to do likewise. Already, before the end of the war, an Italian professor of chemistry, Signor Chiozza, who had applied Pasteur’s methods to silkworms in the neighbourhood of Villa305 Vicentina, got the Italian Government to offer him a laboratory and the direction of a silkworm establishment. Pasteur refused, and a deputy of Pisa, Signor Toscanelli, hearing of this, obtained for Pasteur the offer of what was better still—a professor’s chair of Chemistry applied to Agriculture at Pisa; this would give every facility for work and all laboratory resources. “Pisa,” Signor Chiozza said, “is a quiet town, a sort of Latin quarter in the middle of the country, where professors and students form the greater part of the population. I think you would be received with the greatest cordiality and quite exceptional consideration ... I fear that black days of prolonged agitation306 are in store for France.”
Pasteur’s health and work were indeed valuable to the whole world, and Signor Chiozza’s proposition seemed simple and rational. Pasteur was much divided in his mind: his first impulse was to renew his refusal. He thought but of his vanquished country, and did not wish to forsake307 it. But was it to his country’s real interests that he should remain a helpless spectator of so many disasters? Was it not better to carry French teaching abroad, to try and provoke in young Italian students enthusiasm for French scientists, French achievements? He might still serve his beloved country in that quiet retreat, amidst all those facilities for continuous work. He thought of writing to Raulin, who had relations in Italy, and who might follow his master. Finally, he was offered very great personal advantages, a high salary—and this determined his refusal, for, as he wrote to Signor Chiozza, “I should feel that I deserved a deserter’s penalty if I sought, away from my{201} country in distress, a material situation better than it can offer me.”
“Nevertheless allow me to tell you, Sir (he wrote to Signor Toscanelli, refusing his offer), in all sincerity308, that the memory of your offer will remain in the annals of my family as a title of nobility, as a proof of Italy’s sympathy for France, as a token of the esteem309 accorded to my work. And as far as you, M. le Député, are concerned it will remain in my eyes a brilliant proof of the way in which public men in Italy regard science and its grandeur.”
And now what was Pasteur to do—he who could not live away from a laboratory? In April, 1871, he could neither go back to Paris and the Commune nor to Arbois, now transformed into a Prussian dép?t. It seemed, indeed, from the letters he received that his fellow citizens were now destined310 but to feed and serve a victorious foe, whose exactions were all the more rigorous that the invasion of the town on January 25 had been preceded by an attempt at resistance on the part of the inhabitants. On that morning, a few French soldiers who were seeking their regiments and a handful of franc tireurs had posted themselves among the vines. About ten o’clock a first shot sounded in the distance; in a turn of the sinuous311 Besan?on road, when the Prussian vanguard had appeared, a Zouave—who the day before was begging from door to door, shaking with ague, and who had taken refuge in the village of Montigny, two kilometres from Arbois—had in despair fired his last cartridge312. A squad313 of Prussians left the road and rushed towards the smoke of the gun. The soldier was seized, shot down on the spot, and mutilated with bayonets. Whilst the main column continued their advance towards the town, detachments explored the vines on either side of the road, shooting here and there. An old man who, with a courageous314 indifference315, was working in his vineyard was shot down at his work. A little pastrycook’s boy, nicknamed Biscuit by the Arboisians, who, led by curiosity; had come down from the upper town to the big poplar trees at the entrance of Arbois, suddenly staggered, struck by a Prussian bullet. He was just able to creep back to the first house, his eyes already dimmed by death.
Those were but the chances of war, but other crueller episodes thrilled Pasteur to the very depths of his soul. Such things are lost in history, just as a little blood spilt disappears{202} in a river, but, for the witnesses and contemporaries of the facts, the trace of blood remains316. An incident will help the reader to understand the lasting317 indignation the war excited in Pasteur.
One of the Prussian sergeants318, who, after the shot fired at Montigny, were leading small detachments of soldiers, thought that a house on the outskirts319 of Arbois, in the faubourg of Verreux, looked as if it might shelter franc tireurs. He directed his men towards it and the house was soon reached.
It was now twelve o’clock, all fighting had ceased, and the first Prussians who had arrived were masters of the town. Others were arriving from various directions; a heavy silence reigned320 over the town. The mayor, M. Lefort, led by a Prussian officer who covered him with a revolver whenever he addressed him, was treated as a hostage responsible for absolute submission321. Every door in the small Town Hall was opened in succession in order to see that there were no arms hidden. The mayor was each time made to pass first, so that he should receive the shot in case of a surprise. In the library, three flags, which General Delort had brought back from the Rhine campaign when he was a captain in the cavalry and given to his native town, were torn down and the general’s bust322 overturned.
The sergeant, violently entering the suspected house with his men, found a whole family peacefully sitting down to their dinner—the husband, wife, a son of nineteen, and two young daughters. The invaders323 made no search nor asked any questions of those poor people, who had probably done nothing worse than to offer a few glasses of wine to French soldiers as they passed. The sergeant did not even ask the name of the master of the house (Antoine Ducret, aged fifty-nine), but seized him by his coat and ordered his men to seize the son too. The woman, who rushed to the door in her endeavour to prevent her husband and her son from being thus taken from her, was violently flung to the end of the room, her trembling daughters crouching around her as they listened to the heavy Prussian boots going down the wooden stairs. There is a public drinking fountain not far from the house; Ducret was taken there and placed against a wall. He understood, and cried out, “Spare my son!!” “What do you say?” said the sergeant to the boy. “I will stay with my father,” he answered simply. The father, struck by two bullets at close range, fell at the feet of{203} his son, who was shot down immediately afterwards. The two corpses324, afterwards mutilated with bayonets, remained lying by the water side; the neighbours succeeded in preventing the mother and her two daughters from leaving their house until the bodies had been placed in a coffin. On the tombs of Antoine and Charles Ducret the equivocal inscription325 was placed “Fell at Arbois, January 25, 1871, under Prussian fire.” For the honour of humanity, a German officer, having heard these details, offered the life of the sergeant to Ducret’s widow; but she entertained no thoughts of revenge. “His death would not give them back to me,” she said.
Pasteur could not become resigned to the humiliation of France, and, tearing his thoughts from the nightmare of the war and the Commune, he dwelt continually on the efforts that would be necessary to carry out the great task of raising the country once again to its proper rank. In his mind it was the duty of every one to say, “In what way can I be useful?” Each man should strive not so much to play a great part as to give the best of his ability. He had no patience with those who doubt everything in order to have an excuse for doing nothing.
He had indeed known dark moments of doubt and misgivings326, as even the greatest minds must do, but notwithstanding these periods of discouragement he was convinced that science and peace will ultimately triumph over ignorance and war. In spite of recent events, the bitter conditions of peace which tore unwilling327 Alsace and part of Lorraine away from France, the heavy tax of gold and of blood weighing down future generations, the sad visions of young men in their prime cut down on the battlefield or breathing their last in hospitals all to no apparent purpose; in spite of all these sad memories he was persuaded that thinkers would gradually awaken328 in the nations ideas of justice and of concord109.
He had now for nine years been following with a passionate interest some work begun in his own laboratory by Raulin, his first curator. Some of the letters he wrote to Raulin during those nine years give us a faint idea of the master that Pasteur was. It had been with great regret that Raulin had left the laboratory in obedience329 to the then laws of the University in order to take up active work at the Brest college, and Pasteur’s letters (December, 1862) brought him joy and encouragement: “Keep up your courage, do not allow the idleness of pro{204}vincial life to disturb you. Teach your pupils to the very best of your ability and give up your leisure to experiments; this was M. Biot’s advice to myself.” When in July, 1863, he began to fear that Raulin might allow imagination to lead him astray in his work, he repeatedly advised him to state nothing that could not be proved: “Be very strict in your deductions”; then, apparently, loth to damp the young man’s ardour: “I have the greatest confidence in your judgment330; do not take too much heed152 of my observations.”
In 1863 Pasteur asked Raulin to come with him, Gernez and Duclaux, to Arbois for some studies on wines, etc., but Raulin, absorbed in the investigations331 he had undertaken, refused; in 1865 he refused to come to Alais, still being completely wrapt up in the same work. Pasteur sympathized heartily332 with his pupil’s perseverance, and, when Raulin was at last able to announce to his master the results so long sought after, Pasteur hurried to Caen, where Raulin was now professor of Physics, and returned full of enthusiasm. His modesty333 in all that concerned himself now giving way to delighted pride, he spoke of Raulin’s discoveries to every one. Yet they concerned an apparently unimportant subject—a microscopical335 fungus336, a simple mucor, whose spores337, mingled with atmospheric338 germs, develop on bread moistened with vinegar or on a slice of lemon; yet no precious plant ever inspired more care or solicitude339 than that aspergillus niger, as it is called. Raulin, inspired by Pasteur’s studies on cultures in an artificial medium, that is, a medium exclusively composed of defined chemical substances, resolved to find for this plant a typical medium capable of giving its maximum development to the aspergillus niger. Some of his comrades looked upon this as upon a sort of laboratory amusement; but Raulin, ever a man of one idea, looked upon the culture of microscopic334 vegetation as a step towards a greater knowledge of vegetable physiology340, leading to the development of artificial manure341 production, and from that to the rational nutrition of the human organisms. He started from the conditions indicated by Pasteur for the development of mucedin? in general and in particular for a mucor which has some points of resemblance with the aspergillus niger, the penicillium glaucum, which spreads a bluish tint342 over mouldy bread, jam, and soft cheeses. Raulin began by placing pure spores of aspergillus niger on the surface of a saucer containing everything{205} that seemed necessary to their perfect growth, in a stove heated to a temperature of 20°C.; but in spite of every care, after forty days had passed, the tiny fungus was languishing343 and unhealthy. A temperature of 30° did not seem more successful; and when the stove was heated to above 38° the result was the same. At 35°, with a moist and changing atmosphere, the result was favourable—very fortunately for Raulin, for the principal of the college, an economically minded man, did not approve of burning so much gas for such a tiny fungus and with such poor results. This want of sympathy excited Raulin’s solemn wrath344 and caused him to meditate167 dark projects of revenge, such as ignoring his enemy in the street on some future occasion. In the meanwhile he continued his slow and careful experiments. He succeeded at last in composing a liquid, technically345 called Raulin’s liquid, in which the aspergillus niger grew and flourished within six or even three days. Eleven substances were necessary: water, candied sugar, tartaric acid, nitrate of ammonia, phosphate of ammonia, carbonate of potash, carbonate of magnesia, sulphate of ammonia, sulphate of zinc346, sulphate of iron, and silicate347 of potash. He now studied the part played by each of those elements, varying his quantities, taking away one substance and adding another, and obtained some very curious results. For instance, the aspergillus was extraordinarily348 sensitive to the action of zinc; if the quantity of zinc was reduced by a few milligrams the vegetation decreased by one-tenth. Other elements were pernicious; if Raulin added to his liquid 1/1600000 of nitrate of silver, the growth of the fungus ceased. Moreover, if he placed the liquid in a silver goblet349 instead of a china saucer, the vegetation did not even begin, “though,” writes M. Duclaux, analysing this fine work of his fellow student, “it is almost impossible to chemically detect any dissolution of the silver into the liquid. But the fungus proves it by dying.”
In this thesis, now a classic, which only appeared in 1870, Raulin enumerated with joyful350 gratitude all that he owed to his illustrious master—general views, principles and methods, suggestive ideas, advice and encouragement—saying that Pasteur had shown him the road on which he had travelled so far. Pasteur, touched by his pupil’s affection, wrote to thank him, saying: “You credit me with too much; it is enough for me that your work should be known as having been begun in my{206} laboratory, and in a direction the fruitfulness of which I was perhaps the first to point out. I had only conceived hopes, and you bring us solid realities.”
In April, 1871, Pasteur, preoccupied with the future, and ambitious for those who might come after him, wrote to Claude Bernard: “Allow me to submit to you an idea which has occurred to me, that of conferring on my dear pupil and friend Raulin the Experimental Physiology prize, for his splendid work on the nutriment of mucors, or rather of a mucor, the excellence351 of which work has not escaped you. I doubt if you can find anything better. I must tell you that this idea occurred to me whilst reading your admirable report on the progress of General Physiology in France. If therefore my suggestion seems to you acceptable, you will have sown the germ of it in my mind; if you disapprove352 of it I shall make you partly responsible.”
Claude Bernard hastened to reply: “You may depend upon my support for your pupil M. Raulin. It will be for me both a pleasure and a duty to support such excellent work and to glorify353 the method of the master who inspired it.”
In his letter to Claude Bernard, Pasteur had added these words: “I have made up my mind to go and spend a few months at Royat with my family, so as to be near my dear Duclaux. We shall raise a few grammes of silkworm seed.”
M. Duclaux was then professor of chemistry at the Faculty of Clermont Ferrand, a short distance from Royat, and Pasteur intended to walk every day to the laboratory of his former pupil. But M. Duclaux did not countenance354 this plan; he meant to entertain his master and his master’s family in his own house, 25, Rue6 Montlosier, where he could even have one room arranged as a silkworm nursery. He succeeded in persuading Pasteur, and they organized a delightful355 home life which recalled the days at Pont Gisquet before the war.
Pasteur was seeking the means of making his seed-selecting process applicable to small private nurseries as well as to large industrial establishments. The only difficulty was the cost of the indispensable microscope; but Pasteur thought that each village might possess its microscope, and that the village schoolmaster might be entrusted356 with the examination of the moths357.
In a letter written in April, 1871, to M. Bellotti, of the Milan Civic358 Museum, Pasteur, after describing in a few lines the simple process he had taken five years to study, added{207}—
“If I dared to quote myself, I would recall those words from my book—
“‘If I were a silkworm cultivator I never would raise seed from worms I had not observed during the last days of their life, so as to satisfy myself as to their vigour359 and agility360 just before spinning. The seed chosen should be that which comes from worms who climbed the twigs361 with agility, who showed no mortality from flachery between the fourth moulting and climbing time, and whose freedom from corpuscles will have been demonstrated by the microscope. If that is done, any one with the slightest knowledge of silkworm culture will succeed in every case.’”
Italy and Austria vied with each other in adopting the seed selected by the Pasteur system. But it was only when Pasteur was on the eve of receiving from the Austrian Government the great prize offered in 1868 to “whoever should discover a preventive and curative remedy against pébrine” that French sericicultors began to be convinced. The French character offers this strange contrast, that France is often willing to risk her fortune and her blood for causes which may be unworthy, whilst at another moment, in everyday life, she shrinks at the least innovation before accepting a benefit originated on her own soil. The French often wait until other nations have adopted and approved a French discovery before venturing to adopt it in their turn.
Pasteur did not stop to look back and delight in his success, but hastened to turn his mind to another kind of study. His choice of a subject was influenced by patriotic motives362. Germany was incontestably superior to France in the manufacture of beer, and he conceived the thought of making France a successful rival in that respect; in order to enable himself to do so, he undertook to study the scientific mechanism363 of beer manufacture.
There was a brewery365 at Chamalières, between Clermont and Royat. Pasteur began by visiting it with eager curiosity, inquiring into the minutest details, endeavouring to find out the why and the wherefore of every process, and receiving vague answers with much astonishment366. M. Kuhn, the Chamalières brewer364, did not know much more about beer than did his fellow brewers in general. Very little was known at that time about the way it was produced; when brewers received complaints from their customers, they procured yeast367{208} from a fresh source. In a book of reference which was then much in use, entitled Alimentary368 Substances: the Means of Improving and Preserving them, and of Recognizing their Alterations370, six pages were given up to beer by the author, M. Payen, a member of the Institute. He merely showed that germinated371 barley372, called malt, was diluted373, then heated and mixed with hops374, thus forming beer-wort, which was submitted, when cold, to alcoholic375 fermentation through the yeast added to the above liquid. M. Payen conceded to beer some nutritive properties, but added, a little disdainfully, “Beer, perhaps on account of the pungent376 smell of hops, does not seem endowed with stimulating377 properties as agreeable, or as likely to inspire such bright and cheerful ideas, as the sweet and varied378 aroma379 of the good wines of France.”
In a paragraph on the alterations of beer—“spontaneous alterations”—M. Payen said that it was chiefly during the summer that beer became altered. “It becomes acid, and even noticeably putrid380, and ceases to be fit to drink.”
Pasteur’s hopes of making French beer capable of competing with German beer were much strengthened by faith in his own method. He had, by experimental proof, destroyed the theory of spontaneous generation; he had shown that chance has no share in fermentations; the animated nature and the specific characteristics of those ferments381, the methods of culture in appropriate media, were so many scientific points gained. The difficulties which remained to be solved were the question of pure yeast and the search for the causes of alteration369 which make beer thick, acid, sour, slimy or putrid. Pasteur thought that these alterations were probably due to the development of germs in the air, in the water, or on the surface of the numerous utensils used in a brewery.
As he advanced further and further into that domain382 of the infinitely383 small which he had discovered, whether the subject was wine, vinegar, or silkworms—this last study already opening before him glimpses of light on human pathology—new and unexpected visions rose before his sight.
Pasteur had formerly384 demonstrated that if a putrescible liquid, such as beef broth52 for instance, after being previously385 boiled, is kept in a vessel386 with a long curved neck, the air only reaching it after having deposited its germs in the curves of the neck, does not alter it in any way. He now desired to invent an apparatus387 which would protect the wort against external{209} dusts, against the microscopic germs ever ready to interfere388 with the course of proper fermentation by the introduction of other noxious389 ferments. It was necessary to prove that beer remains unalterable whenever it does not contain the organisms which cause its diseases. Many technical difficulties were in the way, but the brewers of Chamalières tried in the most obliging manner to facilitate things for him.
This exchange of services between science and industry was in accordance with Pasteur’s plan; though he had been prophesying390 for fourteen years the great progress which would result from an alliance between laboratories and factories, the idea was hardly understood at that time. Yet the manufacturers of Lille and Orleans, the wine merchants and the silkworm cultivators of the South of France, and of Austria and Italy, might well have been called as enthusiastic witnesses to the advantages of such a collaboration391.
Pasteur, happy to make the fortune of others, intended to organize, against the danger of alterations in beer, some experiments which would give to that industry solid notions resting on a scientific basis. “Dear master,” wrote he to J. B. Dumas on August 4, 1871, from Clermont, “I have asked the brewer to send you twelve bottles of my beer.... I hope you will find it compares favourably392 even with the excellent beer of Paris cafés.” There was a postscript to this letter, proving once more Pasteur’s solicitude for his pupils. “A thousand thanks for your kind welcome of Raulin’s work; Bernard’s support has also been promised him. The Academy could not find a better recipient393 for the prize. It is quite exceptional work.”
Pasteur, ever full of praises for his pupil, also found excuses for him. In spite of M. Duclaux’s pressing request, Raulin had again found reasons to refuse an invitation to come to Auvergne for a few days. “I regret very much that you did not come to see us,” wrote Pasteur to Raulin, “especially on account of the beer.... Tell me what you think of doing. When are you coming to Paris for good? I shall want you to help me to arrange my laboratory, where everything, as you know, has still to be done; it must be put into working order as soon as possible.”
Pasteur would have liked Raulin to come with him to London in September, 1871, before settling down in Paris.
The Chamalières brewery was no longer sufficient for Pasteur; he wished to see one of those great English breweries394{210} which produce in one year more than 100,000 hectolitres of beer. The great French savant was most courteously395 received by the managers of one of the most important breweries in London, who offered to show him round the works where 250 men were employed. But Pasteur asked for a little of the barm of the porter which was flowing into a trough from the cask. He examined that yeast with a microscope, and soon recognized a noxious ferment155 which he drew on a piece of paper and showed to the bystanders, saying, “This porter must leave much to be desired,” to the astonished managers, who had not expected this sudden criticism. Pasteur added that surely the defect must have been betrayed by a bad taste, perhaps already complained of by some customers. Thereupon the managers owned that that very morning some fresh yeast had had to be procured from another brewery. Pasteur asked to see the new yeast, and found it incomparably purer, but such was not the case with the barm of the other products then in fermentation—ale and pale ale.
By degrees, samples of every kind of beer on the premises396 were brought to Pasteur and put under the microscope. He detected marked beginnings of disease in some, in others merely a trace, but a threatening one. The various foremen were sent for; this scientific visit seemed like a police inquiry. The owner of the brewery, who had been fetched, was obliged to register, one after another, these experimental demonstrations397. It was only human to show a little surprise, perhaps a little impatience398 of wounded feeling. But it was impossible to mistake the authority of the French scientist’s words: “Every marked alteration in the quality of the beer coincides with the development of micro-organisms foreign to the nature of true beer yeast.” It would have been interesting to a psychologist to study in the expression of Pasteur’s hearers those shades of curiosity, doubt, and approbation399, which ended in the thoroughly400 English conclusion that there was profit to be made out of this object lesson.
Pasteur afterwards remembered with a smile the answers he received, rather vague at first, then clearer, and, finally—interest and confidence now obtained—the confession401 that there was in a corner of the brewery a quantity of spoilt beer, which had gone wrong only a fortnight after it was made, and was not drinkable. “I examined it with a microscope,” said Pasteur, “and could not at first detect any ferments of{211} disease; but guessing that it might have become clear through a long rest, the ferments now inert123 having dropped to the bottom of the reservoirs, I examined the deposit at the bottom of the reservoirs. It was entirely composed of filaments402 of disease unmixed with the least globule of alcoholic yeast. The complementary fermentation of that beer had therefore been exclusively a morbid403 fermentation.”
When he visited the same brewery again, a week later, he found that not only had a microscope been procured immediately, but the yeast of all the beer then being brewed404 had been changed.
Pasteur was happy to offer to the English, who like to call themselves practical men, a proof of the usefulness of disinterested science, persuaded as he was that the moral debt incurred405 to a French scientist would in some measure revert406 to France herself. “We must make some friends for our beloved France,” he would say. And if in the course of conversation an Englishman gave expression to any doubt concerning the future of the country, Pasteur, his grave and powerful face full of energy, would answer that every Frenchman, after the horrible storm which had raged for so many months, was valiantly returning to his daily task, whether great or humble, each one thinking of retrieving407 the national fall.
Every morning, as he left his hotel to go to the various breweries which he was now privileged to visit in their smallest details, he observed this English people, knowing the value of time, seeing its own interests in all things, consistent in its ideas and in its efforts, respectful of established institutions and hierarchy408; and he thought with regret how his own countrymen lacked these qualities. But if the French are rightly taxed with a feverish287 love of change, should not justice be rendered to that generous side of the French character, so gifted, capable of so much, and which finds in self-sacrifice the secret of energy, for whom hatred is a real suffering? “Let us work!” Pasteur’s favourite phrase ever ended those philosophical discussions.
He wanted to do two years’ work in one, regardless of health and strength. Beyond the diseases of beer, avoidable since they come from outside, he foresaw the application of the doctrine of exterior409 germs to other diseases. But he did not allow his imagination to run away with him, and resolutely{212} fixed his mind on his present object, which was the application of science to the brewing410 industry.
“The interest of those visits to English breweries,” wrote Pasteur to Raulin, “and of the information I am able to collect (I hear that I ought to consider this as a great favour) causes me to regret very much that you should be in want of rest, for I am sure you would have been charmed to acquire so much instruction de visu. Why should you not come for a day or two if your health permits? Do as you like about that, but in any case prepare for immediate work on my return. We need not wait for the new laboratory; we can settle down in the old one and in a Paris brewery.”
When Pasteur returned to Paris, Bertin, who had not seen him since the recent historic events, welcomed him with a radiant delight. School friendships are like those favourite books which always open at the page we prefer; time has no hold on certain affections; ever new, ever young, they never show signs of age. Bertin’s love was very precious to Pasteur, though the two friends were as different from each other as possible. Pasteur, ever preoccupied, seemed to justify411 the Englishman who said that genius consists in an infinite capacity for taking pains; whilst Bertin, with his merry eyes, was the very image of a smiling philosopher. In spite of his position as sub-director, which he most conscientiously412 filled, he was not afraid to whistle or to sing popular songs as he went along the passages of the Ecole Normale. He came round to Pasteur’s rooms almost every evening, bringing with him joy, lightness of heart, and a rest and relaxation413 for the mind, brightening up his friend by his amusing way of looking at things in general, and—at that time—beer in particular.
Whilst Pasteur saw but pure yeast, and thought but of spores of disease, ferments, and parasitic414 invasions, Bertin would dilate415 on certain cafés in the Latin quarter, where, without regard to great scientific principles, experts could be asked to pronounce between the beer on the premises and laboratory beer, harmless and almost agreeable, but lacking in the refinement416 of taste of which Bertin, who had spent many years in Strasburg, was a competent judge. Pasteur, accustomed to an absolutely infallible method, like that which he had invented for the seeding of silkworms, heard Bertin say to him, “First of all, give me a good bock, you can talk learnedly afterwards.” Pasteur acknowledged, however, the improve{213}ments obtained by certain brewers, who, thanks to the experience of years, knew how to choose yeast which gave a particular taste, and also how to employ preventive measures against accidental and pernicious ferments (such as the use of ice, or of hops in a larger quantity). But, though laughing at Bertin’s jokes, Pasteur was convinced that great progress in the brewer’s art would date from his studies.
He was now going through a series of experiments, buying at Bertin’s much praised cafés samples of various famous beers—Strasburg, Nancy, Vienna, Burton’s, etc. After letting the samples rest for twenty-four hours he decanted417 them and sowed one drop of the deposit in vessels418 full of pure wort, which he placed in a temperature of 20° C. After fifteen or eighteen days he studied and tasted the yeasts419 formed in the wort, and found them all to contain ferments of diseases. He sowed some pure yeast in some other vessels, with the same precautions, and all the beers of this series remained pure from strange ferments and free from bad taste; they had merely become flat.
He was eagerly seeking the means of judging how his laboratory tests would work in practice. He spent some time at Tantonville, in Lorraine, visiting an immense brewery, of which the owners were the brothers Tourtel. Though very carefully kept, the brewery was yet not quite clean enough to satisfy him. It is true that he was more than difficult to please in that respect; a small detail of his everyday life revealed this constant preoccupation. He never used a plate or a glass without examining them minutely and wiping them carefully; no microscopic speck420 of dust escaped his short-sighted eyes. Whether at home or with strangers he invariably went through this preliminary exercise, in spite of the anxious astonishment of his hostess, who usually feared that some negligence421 had occurred, until Pasteur, noticing her slight dismay, assured her that this was but an inveterate422 scientist’s habit. If he carried such minute care into daily life, we can imagine how strict was his examination of scientific things and of brewery tanks.
After those studies at Tantonville with his curator, M. Grenet, Pasteur laid down three great principles—
1. Every alteration either of the wort or of the beer itself depends on the development of micro-organisms which are ferments of diseases.{214}
2. These germs of ferments are brought by the air, by the ingredients, or by the apparatus used in breweries.
3. Whenever beer contains no living germs it is unalterable.
When once those principles were formulated423 and proved they were to triumph over all professional uncertainties424. And in the same way that wines could be preserved from various causes of alteration by heating, bottled beer could escape the development of disease ferments by being brought to a temperature of 50° to 55°. The application of this process gave rise to the new word “pasteurized” beer, a neologism which soon became current in technical language.
Pasteur foresaw the distant consequences of these studies, and wrote in his book on beer—
“When we see beer and wine subjected to deep alterations because they have given refuge to micro-organisms invisibly introduced and now swarming425 within them, it is impossible not to be pursued by the thought that similar facts may, must, take place in animals and in man. But if we are inclined to believe that it is so because we think it likely and possible, let us endeavour to remember, before we affirm it, that the greatest disorder300 of the mind is to allow the will to direct the belief.”
This shows us once more the strange duality of this inspired man, who associated in his person the faith of an apostle with the inquiring patience of a scientist.
He was often disturbed by tiresome426 discussions from the researches to which he would gladly have given his whole time. The heterogenists had not surrendered; they would not admit that alterable organic liquids could be indefinitely preserved from putrefaction427 and fermentation when in contact with air freed from dusts.
Pouchet, the most celebrated of them, who considered that part of a scientist’s duty consists in vulgarizing his discoveries, was preparing for the New Year, 1872, a book called The Universe: the Infinitely Great and the Infinitely Small. He enthusiastically recalled the spectacle revealed at the end of the seventeenth century by the microscope, which he compared to a sixth sense. He praised the discoveries made in 1838 by Ehrenberg on the prodigious428 activity of infusories, but he never mentioned Pasteur’s name, leaving entirely on one side the immense work accomplished by the infinitely small and ever active agents of putrefaction and fermentation.{215} He owned that “a few microzoa did fly about here and there,” but he called the theory of germs a “ridiculous fiction.”
At the same time Liebig, who, since the interview in July, 1870, had had time to recover his health, published a long treatise429 disputing certain facts put forward by Pasteur.
Pasteur had declared that, in the process of vinegar-making known as the German process, the chips of beech-wood placed in the barrels were but supports for the mycoderma aceti. Liebig, after having, he said, consulted at Munich the chief of one of the largest vinegar factories, who did not believe in the presence of the mycoderma, affirmed that he himself had not seen a trace of the fungus on chips which had been used in that factory for twenty-five years.
In order to bring this debate to a conclusion Pasteur suggested a very simple experiment, which was to dry some of those chips rapidly in a stove and to send them to Paris, where a commission, selected from the members of the Académie des Sciences, would decide on this conflict. Pasteur undertook to demonstrate to the Commission the presence of the mycoderma on the surface of the chips. Or another means might be used: the Munich vinegar maker430 would be asked to scald one of his barrels with boiling water and then to make use of it again. “According to Liebig’s theory,” said Pasteur, “that barrel should work as before, but I affirm that no vinegar will form in it for a long time, not until new mycoderma have grown on the surface of the chips.” In effect, the boiling water would destroy the little fungus. With the usual clear directness which increased the interest of the public in this scientific discussion, Pasteur formulated once more his complete theory of acetification: “The principle is very simple: whenever wine is transformed into vinegar, it is by the action of the layer of mycoderma aceti developed on its surface.” Liebig, however, refused the suggested test.
Immediately after that episode a fresh adversary431, M. Frémy, a member of the Académie des Sciences, began with Pasteur a discussion, which was destined to be a long one, on the question of the origin of ferments. M. Frémy alluded432 to the fact that he had given many years to that subject, having published a notice on lactic433 fermentation as far back as 1841, “at a time,” he said, “when our learned colleague—M. Pasteur—was barely entering into science.”... “In the production of wine,” said M. Frémy, “it is the juice of the fruit{216} itself, which, put in contact with air, gives birth to grains of yeast by the transformation434 of albuminous matter, whilst M. Pasteur declares that the grains of yeast are produced by germs.” According to M. Frémy, ferments did not come from atmospheric dusts, but were created by organic bodies. And, inventing for his own use the new word hemiorganism, M. Frémy explained the word and the action by saying that there are some hemiorganized bodies which, by reason of the vital force with which they are endowed, go through successive decompositions and give birth to new derivatives436; thus are ferments engendered437.
Another colleague, M. Trécul, a botanist438 and a genuine truth-seeking savant, arose in his turn. He said he had witnessed a whole transformation of microscopic species each into the other, and in support of this theory he invoked439 the names of the three inseparables—Pouchet, Musset and Joly. Himself a heterogenist, he had in 1867 given a definition to which he willingly alluded: “Heterogenesis is a natural operation by which life, on the point of abandoning an organized body, concentrates its action on some particles of that body and forms thereof beings quite different from that of the substance which has been borrowed.”
Old arguments and renewed negations were brought forward, and Pasteur knew well that this was but a reappearance of the old quarrel; he therefore answered by going straight to the point. At the Académie des Sciences, on December 26, 1871, he addressed M. Trécul in these words: “I can assure our learned colleague that he might have found in the treatises440 I have published decisive answers to most of the questions he has raised. I am really surprised to see him tackle the question of so-called spontaneous generation, without having more at his disposal than doubtful facts and incomplete observations. My astonishment was not less than at our last sitting, when M. Frémy entered upon the same debate with nothing to produce but superannuated441 opinions and not one new positive fact.”
In his passion for truth and his desire to be convincing Pasteur threw out this challenge: “Would M. Frémy confess his error if I were to demonstrate to him that the natural juice of the grape, exposed to the contact of air, deprived of its germs, can neither ferment nor give birth to organized yeasts?” This interpellation was perhaps more violent than{217} was usual in the meetings of the solemn Academy, but scientific truth was in question. And Pasteur, recognizing the old arguments under M. Frémy’s hemiorganism and M. Trécul’s transformations442, referred his two contradictors to the experiments by which he had proved that alterable liquids, such as blood or urine, could be exposed to the contact of air deprived of its germs without undergoing the least fermentation or putrefaction. Had not this fact been the basis on which Lister had founded “his marvellous surgical443 method”? And in the bitterness given to his speech by his irritation against error, the epithet444 “marvellous” burst out with a visible delight in rendering homage to Lister.
Pasteur, then in full possession of all the qualities of his genius, was feeling the sort of fever known to great scientists, great artists, great writers: the ardent desire of finding, of discovering something he could leave to posterity. Interrupted by these belated contradictors when he wanted to be going forward, he only restrained his impatience with difficulty.
His old master, Balard, appealed to him in the Académie itself (January 22, 1872), in the name of their old friendship, to disregard the attacks of his adversaries, instead of wasting his time and his strength in trying to convince them. He reminded him of all he had achieved, of the benefits he had brought to the industries of wine, beer, vinegar, silkworms, etc., and alluded to the possibility foreseen by Pasteur himself of preserving mankind from some of the mysterious diseases which were perhaps due to germs in atmospheric air. He ended by urging him to continue his studies peacefully in the laboratory built for him, and to continue the scientific education of young pupils who might one day become worthy successors of Van Tieghem, Duclaux, Gernez, Raulin, etc.... thus forming a whole generation of young scientists instructed in Pasteur’s school.
M. Duclaux wrote to him in the same sense: “I see very well what you may lose in that fruitless struggle—your rest, your time and your health; I try in vain to see any possible advantage.”
But nothing stopped him; neither Balard’s public advice, his pupils’ letters, even J. B. Dumas’ imploring445 looks. He could not keep himself from replying. Sometimes he regretted his somewhat sharp language, though—in his own words—he never associated it with feelings of hostility446 towards his{218} contradictors as long as he believed in their good faith; what he wanted was that truth should have the last word. “What you lack, M. Frémy, is familiarity with a microscope, and you, M. Trécul, are not accustomed to laboratories!” “M. Frémy is always trying to displace the question,” said Pasteur, ten months after M. Balard’s appeal.
Whilst M. Frémy disputed, discussed, and filled the Académie with his objections, M. Trécul, whose life was somewhat misanthropical447 and whose usually sad and distrustful face was seen nowhere but at the Institute, insisted slowly, in a mournful voice, on certain transformations of divers448 cells or spores from one into the other. Pasteur declared that those ideas of transformation were erroneous; but—and there lay the interest of the debate—there was one of those transformations that Pasteur himself had once believed possible: that of the mycoderma vini, or wine flower, into an alcoholic ferment under certain conditions of existence.
A modification in the life of the mycoderma when submerged had led him to believe in a transformation of the mycoderma cells into yeast cells. It was on this question, which had been left in suspense449, that the debate with Trécul came to an end, leaving to the witnesses of it a most vivid memory of Pasteur’s personality—inflexible when he held his proofs, full of scruples450 and reserve when seeking those proofs, and accepting no personal praise if scientific truth was not recognized and honoured before everything else.
On November 11 Pasteur said: “Four months ago doubts suddenly appeared in my mind as to the truth of the fact in question, and which M. Trécul still looks upon as indisputable.... In order to disperse303 those doubts I have instituted the most numerous and varied experiments and I have not succeeded through those four months in satisfying myself by irrefragable proofs; I still have my doubts. Let this example show to M. Trécul how difficult it is to conclude definitely in such delicate studies.”
Pasteur studied the scientific point for a long time, for he never abandoned a subject, but was ever ready to begin again after a failure. He modified the disposition of his first tests, and by the use of special vessels and slightly complicated apparatus succeeded in eliminating the only imaginable cause of error—the possible fall, during the manipulations, of exterior germs, that is, the fortuitous sowing of yeast cells. After that{219} he saw no more yeast and no more active alcoholic fermentation; he had therefore formerly been the dupe of a delusion. In his Studies on Beer Pasteur tells of his error and its rectification451: “At a time when ideas on the transformations of species are so readily adopted, perhaps because they dispense452 with rigorous experimentation453, it is somewhat interesting to consider that in the course of my researches on microscopic plants in a state of purity I once had occasion to believe in the transformation of one organism into another, the transformation of the mycoderma vini or cerevisiae into yeast, and that this time I was in error; I had not avoided the cause of illusion which my confirmed confidence in the theory of germs had so often led me to discover in the observations of others.”
“The notion of species,” writes M. Duclaux, who was narrowly associated with those experiments, “was saved for the present from the attacks directed against it, and it has not been seriously contested since, at least not on that ground.”
Some failures are blessings454 in disguise. When discovering his mistake, Pasteur directed his attention to a strange phenomenon. We find in his book on beer—a sort of laboratory diary—the following details on his observation of the growth of some mycoderma seed which he had just scattered over some sweetened wine or beer-wort in small china saucers.
“When the cells or articles of the mycoderma vini are in full germinating455 and propagating activity in contact with air on a sweetened substratum, they live at the expense of that sugar and other subjacent materials absolutely like the animals who also utilize456 the oxygen in the air while freeing carbonic acid gas, consuming this and that, and correlatively increasing, regenerating457 themselves and creating new materials.
“Under those conditions not only does the mycoderma vini form no alcohol appreciable458 by analysis, but if alcohol exists in the subjacent liquid the mycoderma reduces it to water and carbonic acid gas by the fixation of the oxygen in the air.” Pasteur, having submerged the mycoderma and studied it to see how it would accommodate itself to the new conditions offered to it, and whether it would die like an animal asphyxiated459 by the sudden deprivation460 of oxygen, saw that life was continued in the submerged cells, slow, difficult, of a short duration, but undoubtedly461 life, and that this life was accompanied by alcoholic fermentation. This time fermentation was due to the fungus itself. The mycoderma, originally an{220} a?robia—that is, a being to the life and development of which air was necessary—became, after being submerged, an ana?robia, that is, a creature living without air in the depths of the liquid, and behaving after the manner of ferments.
This extended the notions on a?robi? and ana?robi? which Pasteur had formerly discovered whilst making researches concerning the vibrio which is the butyric ferment, and those vibriones which are entrusted with the special fermentation known as putrefaction. Between the a?robi? who require air to live and the ana?robi? which perish when exposed to air, there was a class of organisms capable of living for a time outside the influence of air. No one had thought of studying the mouldiness which develops so easily when in contact with air; Pasteur was curious to see what became of it when submitted like the mycoderma to that unexpected régime. He saw the penicillium, the aspergillus, the mucor-mucedo take the character of ferments when living without air, or with a quantity of air too small to surround their organs as completely as was necessary to their a?robia-plant life. The mucor, when submerged and thus forced to become an ana?robia, offers budding cells, and there again it seemed as if they were yeast globules. “But,” said Pasteur, “this change of form merely corresponds to a change of function, it is but a self-adaptation to the new life of an ana?robia.” And then, generalizing again and seeking for laws under the accumulation of isolated facts, he thought it probable that ferments had, “but in a higher degree, a character common to most mucors if not to all, and probably possessed more or less by all living cells, viz., to be alternately a?robic or ana?robic, according to conditions of environment.”
Fermentation, therefore, no longer appeared as an isolated and mysterious act; it was a general phenomenon, subordinate however to the small number of substances capable of a decomposition435 accompanied by a production of heat and of being used for the alimentation of inferior beings outside the presence and action of air. Pasteur put the whole theory into this concise462 formula, “Fermentation is life without air.”
“It will be seen,” wrote M. Duclaux, “to what heights he had raised the debate; by changing the mode of interpretation463 of known facts he brought out a new theory.”
But this new theory raised a chorus of controversy464. Pasteur held to his proofs; he recalled what he had published concern{221}ing the typical ferment, the yeast of beer, an article inserted in the reports of the Académie des Sciences for 1861, and entitled, The Influence of Oxygen on the Development of Yeast and on Alcoholic Fermentation. In this article Pasteur, à propos of the chemical action connected with vegetable life, explained in the most interesting manner the two modes of life of the yeast of beer.
1. The yeast, placed in some sweet liquid in contact with air, assimilates oxygen gas and develops abundantly; under those conditions, it practically works for itself only, the production of alcohol is insignificant465, and the proportion between the weight of sugar absorbed and that of the yeast is infinitesimal. 2. But, in its second mode of life, if yeast is made to act upon sugar without the action of atmospheric air, it can no longer freely assimilate oxygen gas, and is reduced to abstracting oxygen from the fermentescible matter.
“It seems therefore natural,” wrote Pasteur, “to admit that when yeast is a ferment, acting249 out of the reach of atmospheric air, it takes oxygen from sugar, that being the origin of its fermentative character.” It is possible to put the fermentative power of yeast through divers degrees of intensity466 by introducing free oxygen in variable quantities.
After comparing the yeast of beer to an ordinary plant, Pasteur added that “the analogy would be complete if ordinary plants had an affinity467 for oxygen so strong as to breathe, by withdrawing that element from unstable468 components, in which case they would act as ferments on those substances.” He suggested that it might be possible to meet with conditions which would allow certain inferior plants to live away from atmospheric air in the presence of sugar, and to provoke fermentation of that substance after the manner of beer yeast.
He was already at that time scattering469 germs of ideas, with the intention of taking them up later on and experimenting on them, or, if time should fail him, willingly offering them to any attentive470 scientist. These studies on beer had brought him back to his former studies, to his great delight.
“What a sacrifice I made for you,” he could not help saying to Dumas, with a mixture of affection and deference471, and some modesty, for he apparently forgot the immense service rendered to sericiculture, “when I gave up my studies on ferments for five whole years in order to study silkworms!!!”
No doubt a great deal of time was also wasted by the endless{222} discussions entered into by his scientific adversaries; but those discussions certainly brought out and evidenced many guiding facts which are now undisputed, as for instance the following—1. Ferments are living beings. 2. There is a special ferment corresponding to each kind of fermentation. 3. Ferments are not born spontaneously.
Liebig and his partisans472 had looked upon fermentation as a phenomenon of death; they had thought that beer yeast, and in general all animal and vegetable matter in a state of putrefaction, extended to other bodies its own state of decomposition.
Pasteur, on the contrary, had seen in fermentation a phenomenon correlative with life; he had provoked the complete fermentation of a sweet liquid which contained mineral substances only, by introducing into it a trace of yeast, which, instead of dying, lived, flourished and developed.
To those who, believing in spontaneous generation, saw in fermentations but a question of chance, Pasteur by a series of experimental proofs had shown the origin of their delusion by indicating the door open to germs coming from outside. He had moreover taught the method of pure cultures. Finally, in those recent renewals473 of old quarrels on the transformations into each other of microscopic species, Pasteur, obliged by the mycoderma vini to study closely its alleged474 transformation, which he had himself believed possible, had thrown ample light on the only dark spot of his luminous475 domain.
“It is enough to think,” writes M. Duclaux concerning that long discussion, “we have but to remember that those who denied the specific nature of the germ would now deny the specific nature of disease, in order to understand the darkness in which such opinions would have confined microbian pathology; it was therefore important that they should be uprooted476 from every mind.{223}”
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1
laborious
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| adj.吃力的，努力的，不流畅 | |
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2
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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3
rivalry
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| n.竞争，竞赛，对抗 | |
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4
crumble
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| vi.碎裂，崩溃；vt.弄碎，摧毁 | |
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5
embittered
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| v.使怨恨，激怒( embitter的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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6
rue
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| n.懊悔，芸香，后悔；v.后悔，悲伤，懊悔 | |
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7
unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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8
adversaries
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| n.对手，敌手( adversary的名词复数 ) | |
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9
quotations
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| n.引用( quotation的名词复数 )；[商业]行情（报告）；（货物或股票的）市价；时价 | |
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10
ardent
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，强烈的，烈性的 | |
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11
disinterested
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| adj.不关心的，不感兴趣的 | |
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12
mingled
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| 混合，混入( mingle的过去式和过去分词 )； 混进，与…交往[联系] | |
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13
kindliness
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| n.厚道，亲切，友好的行为 | |
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14
disinterestedness
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15
sociability
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| n.好交际，社交性，善于交际 | |
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16
artillery
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| n.(军)火炮，大炮；炮兵(部队) | |
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17
cavalry
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| n.骑兵；轻装甲部队 | |
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18
delusion
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| n.谬见，欺骗，幻觉，迷惑 | |
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19
garnished
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| v.给（上餐桌的食物）加装饰( garnish的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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20
bristling
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| a.竖立的 | |
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21
fortresses
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| 堡垒，要塞( fortress的名词复数 ) | |
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22
fortress
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| n.堡垒，防御工事 | |
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23
cannon
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| n.大炮，火炮；飞机上的机关炮 | |
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24
gratitude
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| adj.感激，感谢 | |
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25
territorial
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| adj.领土的，领地的 | |
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26
aggrandizement
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| n.增大，强化，扩大 | |
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27
compensated
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| 补偿，报酬( compensate的过去式和过去分词 )； 给（某人）赔偿（或赔款） | |
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28
redoubtable
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| adj.可敬的；可怕的 | |
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29
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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30
swarmed
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| 密集( swarm的过去式和过去分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
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31
buffer
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| n.起缓冲作用的人(或物)，缓冲器；vt.缓冲 | |
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32
haughty
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| adj.傲慢的，高傲的 | |
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33
cession
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| n.割让，转让 | |
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34
annexation
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| n.吞并，合并 | |
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35
annex
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| vt.兼并，吞并；n.附属建筑物 | |
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36
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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37
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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38
intrigues
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| n.密谋策划( intrigue的名词复数 )；神秘气氛；引人入胜的复杂情节v.搞阴谋诡计( intrigue的第三人称单数 )；激起…的好奇心 | |
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39
rejection
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| n.拒绝，被拒，抛弃，被弃 | |
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40
arbiter
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| n.仲裁人，公断人 | |
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41
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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42
contemptible
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| adj.可鄙的，可轻视的，卑劣的 | |
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43
reign
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| n.统治时期，统治，支配，盛行；v.占优势 | |
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44
postponed
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| vt.& vi.延期，缓办，（使）延迟vt.把…放在次要地位；[语]把…放在后面（或句尾）vi.（疟疾等）延缓发作（或复发） | |
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45
affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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46
irritation
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| n.激怒，恼怒，生气 | |
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47
peril
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| n.(严重的)危险；危险的事物 | |
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48
conspired
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| 密谋( conspire的过去式和过去分词 )； 搞阴谋； （事件等）巧合； 共同导致 | |
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49
grievances
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| n.委屈( grievance的名词复数 )；苦衷；不满；牢骚 | |
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50
prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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51
generosity
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| n.大度，慷慨，慷慨的行为 | |
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52
broth
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| n.原(汁)汤(鱼汤、肉汤、菜汤等) | |
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53
brotherhood
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| n.兄弟般的关系，手中情谊 | |
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54
engulfed
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| v.吞没，包住( engulf的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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55
brutal
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| adj.残忍的，野蛮的，不讲理的 | |
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56
brutality
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| n.野蛮的行为，残忍，野蛮 | |
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57
prey
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| n.被掠食者，牺牲者，掠食；v.捕食，掠夺，折磨 | |
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58
disastrous
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| adj.灾难性的，造成灾害的；极坏的，很糟的 | |
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59
skilful
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| (=skillful)adj.灵巧的，熟练的 | |
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60
arsenals
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| n.兵工厂，军火库( arsenal的名词复数 )；任何事物的集成 | |
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61
infantry
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| n.[总称]步兵(部队) | |
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62
apron
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| n.围裙；工作裙 | |
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63
imminent
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| adj.即将发生的，临近的，逼近的 | |
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64
patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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65
battalion
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| n.营；部队；大队(的人) | |
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66
enlisted
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| adj.应募入伍的v.（使）入伍， （使）参军( enlist的过去式和过去分词 )；获得（帮助或支持） | |
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67
aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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68
regiment
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| n.团，多数，管理；v.组织，编成团，统制 | |
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69
enrolled
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| adj.入学登记了的v.[亦作enrol]( enroll的过去式和过去分词 )；登记，招收，使入伍（或入会、入学等），参加，成为成员；记入名册；卷起，包起 | |
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70
deserted
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| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
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71
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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72
passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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73
concurring
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| 同时发生的，并发的 | |
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74
inductions
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| 归纳（法）( induction的名词复数 )； （电或磁的）感应； 就职； 吸入 | |
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75
phenomena
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| n.现象 | |
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76
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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77
enveloped
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| v.包围，笼罩，包住( envelop的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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78
imbued
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| v.使（某人/某事）充满或激起（感情等）( imbue的过去式和过去分词 )；使充满；灌输；激发（强烈感情或品质等） | |
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79
humility
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| n.谦逊，谦恭 | |
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80
admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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81
trumpet
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| n.喇叭，喇叭声；v.吹喇叭，吹嘘 | |
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82
anguish
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| n.(尤指心灵上的)极度痛苦，烦恼 | |
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83
anguished
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| adj.极其痛苦的v.使极度痛苦(anguish的过去式) | |
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84
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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85
effigy
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| n.肖像 | |
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86
lithograph
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| n.平板印刷，平板画；v.用平版印刷 | |
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87
epoch
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| n.(新)时代；历元 | |
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88
humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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89
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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90
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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91
lugubrious
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| adj.悲哀的，忧郁的 | |
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92
poignant
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| adj.令人痛苦的，辛酸的，惨痛的 | |
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93
insistency
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| 强迫，坚决要求 | |
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94
grandeur
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| n.伟大，崇高，宏伟，庄严，豪华 | |
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95
epic
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| n.史诗，叙事诗；adj.史诗般的，壮丽的 | |
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96
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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97
rendezvous
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| n.约会，约会地点，汇合点；vi.汇合，集合；vt.使汇合，使在汇合地点相遇 | |
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98
clemency
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| n.温和，仁慈，宽厚 | |
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99
chancellor
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| n.(英)大臣；法官；(德、奥)总理；大学校长 | |
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100
protracted
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| adj.拖延的；延长的v.拖延“protract”的过去式和过去分词 | |
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101
chateau
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| n.城堡，别墅 | |
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102
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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103
disarmed
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| v.裁军( disarm的过去式和过去分词 )；使息怒 | |
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104
eloquence
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| n.雄辩；口才，修辞 | |
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105
posterity
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| n.后裔，子孙，后代 | |
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106
celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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107
iniquitously
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| adv.不正地，非法地 | |
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108
pretext
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| n.借口，托词 | |
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109
concord
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| n.和谐；协调 | |
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110
incarnate
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| adj.化身的，人体化的，肉色的 | |
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111
shudder
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| v.战粟，震动，剧烈地摇晃；n.战粟，抖动 | |
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112
odious
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| adj.可憎的，讨厌的 | |
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113
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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114
humiliation
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| n.羞辱 | |
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115
vibration
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| n.颤动，振动；摆动 | |
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116
defiance
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| n.挑战，挑衅，蔑视，违抗 | |
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117
overflowed
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| 溢出的 | |
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118
scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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119
vent
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| n.通风口，排放口；开衩；vt.表达，发泄 | |
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120
confided
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| v.吐露（秘密，心事等）( confide的过去式和过去分词 )；（向某人）吐露（隐私、秘密等） | |
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121
folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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122
inertia
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| adj.惰性，惯性，懒惰，迟钝 | |
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123
inert
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| adj.无活动能力的，惰性的；迟钝的 | |
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124
deplored
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| v.悲叹，痛惜，强烈反对( deplore的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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125
politic
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| adj.有智虑的；精明的；v.从政 | |
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126
diffusion
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| n.流布；普及；散漫 | |
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127
distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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128
hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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129
psalms
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| n.赞美诗( psalm的名词复数 )；圣诗；圣歌；(中的) | |
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130
psalm
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| n.赞美诗，圣诗 | |
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131
hurl
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| vt.猛投，力掷，声叫骂 | |
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132
irresistible
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| adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的 | |
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133
kindled
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| （使某物）燃烧，着火( kindle的过去式和过去分词 )； 激起（感情等）； 发亮，放光 | |
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134
insolence
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| n.傲慢；无礼；厚颜；傲慢的态度 | |
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135
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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136
sobbing
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| <主方>Ⅰ adj.湿透的 | |
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137
deluded
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| v.欺骗，哄骗( delude的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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138
eluded
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| v.（尤指机敏地）避开( elude的过去式和过去分词 )；逃避；躲避；使达不到 | |
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139
victorious
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| adj.胜利的，得胜的 | |
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140
indemnity
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| n.赔偿，赔款，补偿金 | |
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141
exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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142
opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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143
authoritative
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| adj.有权威的，可相信的；命令式的；官方的 | |
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144
insolent
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| adj.傲慢的，无理的 | |
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145
tranquillity
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| n. 平静, 安静 | |
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146
garrison
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| n.卫戍部队；驻地，卫戍区；vt.派(兵)驻防 | |
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147
perils
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| 极大危险( peril的名词复数 )； 危险的事（或环境） | |
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148
inflexible
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| adj.不可改变的，不受影响的，不屈服的 | |
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149
foe
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| n.敌人，仇敌 | |
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150
ardently
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| adv.热心地，热烈地 | |
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151
resounded
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| v.（指声音等）回荡于某处( resound的过去式和过去分词 )；产生回响；（指某处）回荡着声音 | |
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152
heed
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| v.注意，留意；n.注意，留心 | |
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153
joint
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| adj.联合的，共同的；n.关节，接合处；v.连接，贴合 | |
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154
applied
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| adj.应用的；v.应用，适用 | |
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155
ferment
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| vt.使发酵；n./vt.（使）激动，（使）动乱 | |
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156
dough
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| n.生面团；钱，现款 | |
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157
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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158
transcribed
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| （用不同的录音手段）转录( transcribe的过去式和过去分词 )； 改编（乐曲）（以适应他种乐器或声部）； 抄写； 用音标标出（声音） | |
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159
hygiene
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| n.健康法，卫生学 （a.hygienic） | |
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160
dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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161
wholesome
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| adj.适合；卫生的；有益健康的；显示身心健康的 | |
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162
worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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163
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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164
purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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165
habitual
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| adj.习惯性的；通常的，惯常的 | |
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166
corps
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| n.(通信等兵种的)部队；(同类作的)一组 | |
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167
meditate
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| v.想，考虑，（尤指宗教上的）沉思，冥想 | |
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168
meditated
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| 深思，沉思，冥想( meditate的过去式和过去分词 )； 内心策划，考虑 | |
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169
follower
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| n.跟随者；随员；门徒；信徒 | |
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170
tempted
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| v.怂恿（某人）干不正当的事；冒…的险（tempt的过去分词） | |
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171
isolated
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| adj.与世隔绝的 | |
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172
propounded
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| v.提出（问题、计划等）供考虑[讨论]，提议( propound的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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173
doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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174
succumbed
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| 不再抵抗（诱惑、疾病、攻击等）( succumb的过去式和过去分词 )； 屈从； 被压垮； 死 | |
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175
avowal
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| n.公开宣称，坦白承认 | |
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176
averred
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| v.断言( aver的过去式和过去分词 )；证实；证明…属实；作为事实提出 | |
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177
steering
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| n.操舵装置 | |
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178
inquiry
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| n.打听，询问，调查，查问 | |
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179
procured
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| v.（努力）取得， （设法）获得( procure的过去式和过去分词 )；拉皮条 | |
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180
implored
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| 恳求或乞求（某人）( implore的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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181
abstain
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| v.自制，戒绝，弃权，避免 | |
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182
coffins
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| n.棺材( coffin的名词复数 )；使某人早亡[死，完蛋，垮台等]之物 | |
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183
coffin
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| n.棺材，灵柩 | |
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184
cemetery
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| n.坟墓，墓地，坟场 | |
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185
infancy
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| n.婴儿期；幼年期；初期 | |
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186
binding
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| 有约束力的，有效的，应遵守的 | |
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187
desolate
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| adj.荒凉的，荒芜的；孤独的，凄凉的；v.使荒芜，使孤寂 | |
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188
suffocating
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| a.使人窒息的 | |
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189
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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190
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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191
picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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192
penury
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| n.贫穷，拮据 | |
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193
antiquities
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| n.古老( antiquity的名词复数 )；古迹；古人们；古代的风俗习惯 | |
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194
faculties
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| n.能力( faculty的名词复数 )；全体教职员；技巧；院 | |
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195
animated
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| adj.生气勃勃的，活跃的，愉快的 | |
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196
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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197
execration
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| n.诅咒，念咒，憎恶 | |
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198
asseverating
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| v.郑重声明，断言( asseverate的现在分词 ) | |
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199
affixed
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| adj.[医]附着的，附着的v.附加( affix的过去式和过去分词 )；粘贴；加以；盖（印章） | |
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200
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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201
efface
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| v.擦掉，抹去 | |
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202
hypocrisy
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| n.伪善，虚伪 | |
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203
massacre
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| n.残杀，大屠杀；v.残杀，集体屠杀 | |
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204
infamy
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| n.声名狼藉，出丑，恶行 | |
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205
inscribed
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| v.写，刻( inscribe的过去式和过去分词 )；内接 | |
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206
vend
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| v.公开表明观点，出售，贩卖 | |
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207
outrages
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| 引起…的义愤，激怒( outrage的第三人称单数 ) | |
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208
pillage
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| v.抢劫；掠夺；n.抢劫，掠夺；掠夺物 | |
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209
trample
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| vt.踩，践踏；无视，伤害，侵犯 | |
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210
heroism
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| n.大无畏精神，英勇 | |
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211
illustrated
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| adj. 有插图的，列举的 动词illustrate的过去式和过去分词 | |
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212
psychology
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| n.心理，心理学，心理状态 | |
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213
intoxication
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| n.wild excitement;drunkenness；poisoning | |
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214
pensive
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| a.沉思的,哀思的,忧沉的 | |
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215
renouncing
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| v.声明放弃( renounce的现在分词 )；宣布放弃；宣布与…决裂；宣布摒弃 | |
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216
exempt
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| adj.免除的；v.使免除；n.免税者，被免除义务者 | |
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217
valiantly
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| adv.勇敢地，英勇地；雄赳赳 | |
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218
homage
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| n.尊敬，敬意，崇敬 | |
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219
prospects
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| n.希望，前途(恒为复数) | |
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220
physicist
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| n.物理学家，研究物理学的人 | |
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221
bereaved
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| adj.刚刚丧失亲人的v.使失去（希望、生命等）( bereave的过去式和过去分词)；（尤指死亡）使丧失（亲人、朋友等）；使孤寂；抢走（财物） | |
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222
dwellings
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| n.住处，处所( dwelling的名词复数 ) | |
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223
utensils
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| 器具，用具，器皿( utensil的名词复数 )； 器物 | |
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224
porcelain
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| n.瓷；adj.瓷的，瓷制的 | |
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225
abode
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| n.住处，住所 | |
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226
barometers
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| 气压计，晴雨表( barometer的名词复数 ) | |
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227
accomplished
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| adj.有才艺的；有造诣的；达到了的 | |
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228
condoling
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| v.表示同情，吊唁( condole的现在分词 ) | |
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229
determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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230
regiments
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| （军队的）团( regiment的名词复数 )； 大量的人或物 | |
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231
tattered
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| adj.破旧的，衣衫破的 | |
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232
lamentable
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| adj.令人惋惜的，悔恨的 | |
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233
caravan
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| n.大蓬车；活动房屋 | |
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234
wreck
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| n.失事，遇难；沉船；vt.(船等)失事，遇难 | |
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235
crouching
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的现在分词 ) | |
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236
sergeant
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| n.警官，中士 | |
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237
muffled
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|
| adj.（声音）被隔的；听不太清的；（衣服）裹严的；蒙住的v.压抑，捂住( muffle的过去式和过去分词 )；用厚厚的衣帽包着（自己） | |
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238
armistice
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| n.休战，停战协定 | |
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239
restriction
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| n.限制，约束 | |
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240
peculiar
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|
| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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241
protocol
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| n.议定书，草约，会谈记录，外交礼节 | |
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242
belligerents
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| n.交战的一方（指国家、集团或个人）( belligerent的名词复数 ) | |
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243
eastwards
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|
| adj.向东方（的），朝东（的）；n.向东的方向 | |
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244
eminent
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|
| adj.显赫的，杰出的，有名的，优良的 | |
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245
eminently
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| adv.突出地；显著地；不寻常地 | |
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246
fatigue
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|
| n.疲劳，劳累 | |
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247
disdain
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|
| n.鄙视，轻视；v.轻视，鄙视，不屑 | |
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248
enumerated
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|
| v.列举，枚举，数( enumerate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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249
acting
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|
| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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250
gunpowder
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|
| n.火药 | |
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251
patriotism
|
|
| n.爱国精神，爱国心，爱国主义 | |
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252
perturbed
|
|
| adj.烦燥不安的v.使（某人）烦恼，不安( perturb的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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253
slanderous
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|
| adj.诽谤的，中伤的 | |
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254
placidly
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|
| adv.平稳地，平静地 | |
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255
reigning
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|
| adj.统治的，起支配作用的 | |
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256
distinguished
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|
| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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257
intervals
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|
| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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258
effacement
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|
| n.抹消，抹杀 | |
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259
alluding
|
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| 提及，暗指( allude的现在分词 ) | |
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260
supremacy
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|
| n.至上；至高权力 | |
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261
stimulated
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| a.刺激的 | |
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262
rendering
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|
| n.表现，描写 | |
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263
emulation
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|
| n.竞争；仿效 | |
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264
bestowing
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| 砖窑中砖堆上层已烧透的砖 | |
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265
enervated
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|
| adj.衰弱的，无力的v.使衰弱，使失去活力( enervate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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266
cultivation
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|
| n.耕作，培养，栽培（法），养成 | |
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267
manifestations
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|
| n.表示，显示（manifestation的复数形式） | |
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268
philosophic
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|
| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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269
philosophical
|
|
| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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270
condemns
|
|
| v.（通常因道义上的原因而）谴责( condemn的第三人称单数 )；宣判；宣布…不能使用；迫使…陷于不幸的境地 | |
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271
scatters
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|
| v.（使）散开， （使）分散，驱散( scatter的第三人称单数 )；撒 | |
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272
intensified
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|
| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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273
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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274
generalization
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|
| n.普遍性，一般性，概括 | |
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275
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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276
perseverance
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|
| n.坚持不懈，不屈不挠 | |
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277
devastation
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|
| n.毁坏；荒废；极度震惊或悲伤 | |
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278
taint
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|
| n.污点；感染；腐坏；v.使感染；污染 | |
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279
screed
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|
| n.长篇大论 | |
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280
invoking
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|
| v.援引( invoke的现在分词 )；行使（权利等）；祈求救助；恳求 | |
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281
postscript
|
|
| n.附言，又及；(正文后的)补充说明 | |
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282
inevitable
|
|
| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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283
savagery
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|
| n.野性 | |
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284
deluding
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|
| v.欺骗，哄骗( delude的现在分词 ) | |
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285
devoted
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|
| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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286
feverishly
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|
| adv. 兴奋地 | |
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287
feverish
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|
| adj.发烧的，狂热的，兴奋的 | |
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288
affinities
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|
| n.密切关系( affinity的名词复数 )；亲近；（生性）喜爱；类同 | |
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289
molecular
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|
| adj.分子的；克分子的 | |
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290
disposition
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|
| n.性情，性格；意向，倾向；排列，部署 | |
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291
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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292
magnetism
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|
| n.磁性，吸引力，磁学 | |
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293
soda
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|
| n.苏打水；汽水 | |
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294
modification
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|
| n.修改，改进，缓和，减轻 | |
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295
jotted
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|
| v.匆忙记下( jot的过去式和过去分词 )；草草记下，匆匆记下 | |
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296
divination
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|
| n.占卜，预测 | |
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297
possessed
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|
| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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298
molecule
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|
| n.分子，克分子 | |
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299
jeopardized
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|
| 危及，损害( jeopardize的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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300
disorder
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|
| n.紊乱，混乱；骚动，骚乱；疾病，失调 | |
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301
disorders
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|
| n.混乱( disorder的名词复数 )；凌乱；骚乱；（身心、机能）失调 | |
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302
dispersed
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|
| adj. 被驱散的, 被分散的, 散布的 | |
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303
disperse
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|
| vi.使分散；使消失；vt.分散；驱散 | |
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304
meditations
|
|
| 默想( meditation的名词复数 )； 默念； 沉思； 冥想 | |
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305
villa
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|
| n.别墅，城郊小屋 | |
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306
agitation
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|
| n.搅动；搅拌；鼓动，煽动 | |
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307
forsake
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|
| vt.遗弃，抛弃；舍弃，放弃 | |
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308
sincerity
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|
| n.真诚，诚意；真实 | |
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309
esteem
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|
| n.尊敬，尊重；vt.尊重，敬重；把…看作 | |
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310
destined
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|
| adj.命中注定的；(for)以…为目的地的 | |
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311
sinuous
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|
| adj.蜿蜒的，迂回的 | |
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312
cartridge
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|
| n.弹壳，弹药筒；(装磁带等的)盒子 | |
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313
squad
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|
| n.班，小队，小团体；vt.把…编成班或小组 | |
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314
courageous
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|
| adj.勇敢的，有胆量的 | |
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315
indifference
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|
| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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316
remains
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|
| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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317
lasting
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|
| adj.永久的，永恒的；vbl.持续，维持 | |
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318
sergeants
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|
| 警官( sergeant的名词复数 )； （美国警察）警佐； （英国警察）巡佐； 陆军（或空军）中士 | |
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319
outskirts
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| n.郊外，郊区 | |
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320
reigned
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|
| vi.当政，统治（reign的过去式形式） | |
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321
submission
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|
| n.服从，投降；温顺，谦虚；提出 | |
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322
bust
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|
| vt.打破；vi.爆裂；n.半身像；胸部 | |
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323
invaders
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|
| 入侵者，侵略者，侵入物( invader的名词复数 ) | |
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324
corpses
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|
| n.死尸，尸体( corpse的名词复数 ) | |
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325
inscription
|
|
| n.（尤指石块上的）刻印文字，铭文，碑文 | |
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326
misgivings
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|
| n.疑虑，担忧，害怕；疑虑，担心，恐惧( misgiving的名词复数 )；疑惧 | |
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327
unwilling
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|
| adj.不情愿的 | |
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328
awaken
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|
| vi.醒，觉醒；vt.唤醒，使觉醒，唤起，激起 | |
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329
obedience
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|
| n.服从，顺从 | |
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330
judgment
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|
| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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331
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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332
heartily
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|
| adv.衷心地，诚恳地，十分，很 | |
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333
modesty
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|
| n.谦逊，虚心，端庄，稳重，羞怯，朴素 | |
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334
microscopic
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|
| adj.微小的，细微的，极小的，显微的 | |
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335
microscopical
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|
| adj.显微镜的，精微的 | |
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336
fungus
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|
| n.真菌，真菌类植物 | |
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337
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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338
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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339
solicitude
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|
| n.焦虑 | |
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340
physiology
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|
| n.生理学，生理机能 | |
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341
manure
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|
| n.粪，肥，肥粒；vt.施肥 | |
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342
tint
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|
| n.淡色，浅色；染发剂；vt.着以淡淡的颜色 | |
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343
languishing
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|
| a. 衰弱下去的 | |
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344
wrath
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|
| n.愤怒，愤慨，暴怒 | |
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345
technically
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|
| adv.专门地，技术上地 | |
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346
zinc
|
|
| n.锌；vt.在...上镀锌 | |
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347
silicate
|
|
| n.硅酸盐 | |
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348
extraordinarily
|
|
| adv.格外地；极端地 | |
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349
goblet
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|
| n.高脚酒杯 | |
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350
joyful
|
|
| adj.欢乐的，令人欢欣的 | |
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351
excellence
|
|
| n.优秀，杰出，(pl.)优点，美德 | |
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352
disapprove
|
|
| v.不赞成，不同意，不批准 | |
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353
glorify
|
|
| vt.颂扬，赞美，使增光，美化 | |
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354
countenance
|
|
| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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355
delightful
|
|
| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
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356
entrusted
|
|
| v.委托，托付( entrust的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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357
moths
|
|
| n.蛾( moth的名词复数 ) | |
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358
civic
|
|
| adj.城市的，都市的，市民的，公民的 | |
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359
vigour
|
|
| （=vigor）n.智力，体力，精力 | |
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360
agility
|
|
| n.敏捷，活泼 | |
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361
twigs
|
|
| 细枝，嫩枝( twig的名词复数 ) | |
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362
motives
|
|
| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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363
mechanism
|
|
| n.机械装置；机构，结构 | |
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364
brewer
|
|
| n. 啤酒制造者 | |
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365
brewery
|
|
| n.啤酒厂 | |
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366
astonishment
|
|
| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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367
yeast
|
|
| n.酵母；酵母片；泡沫；v.发酵；起泡沫 | |
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368
alimentary
|
|
| adj.饮食的，营养的 | |
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369
alteration
|
|
| n.变更，改变；蚀变 | |
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370
alterations
|
|
| n.改动( alteration的名词复数 )；更改；变化；改变 | |
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371
germinated
|
|
| v.（使）发芽( germinate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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|
372
barley
|
|
| n.大麦，大麦粒 | |
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373
diluted
|
|
| 无力的，冲淡的 | |
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374
hops
|
|
| 跳上[下]( hop的第三人称单数 )； 单足蹦跳； 齐足（或双足）跳行； 摘葎草花 | |
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375
alcoholic
|
|
| adj.（含）酒精的，由酒精引起的；n.酗酒者 | |
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376
pungent
|
|
| adj.（气味、味道）刺激性的，辛辣的；尖锐的 | |
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377
stimulating
|
|
| adj.有启发性的，能激发人思考的 | |
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|
378
varied
|
|
| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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|
379
aroma
|
|
| n.香气，芬芳，芳香 | |
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|
380
putrid
|
|
| adj.腐臭的；有毒的；已腐烂的；卑劣的 | |
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381
ferments
|
|
| 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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382
domain
|
|
| n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围 | |
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|
383
infinitely
|
|
| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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|
384
formerly
|
|
| adv.从前，以前 | |
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|
385
previously
|
|
| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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386
vessel
|
|
| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
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|
387
apparatus
|
|
| n.装置，器械；器具，设备 | |
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|
388
interfere
|
|
| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
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389
noxious
|
|
| adj.有害的，有毒的；使道德败坏的，讨厌的 | |
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|
390
prophesying
|
|
| v.预告，预言( prophesy的现在分词 ) | |
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|
391
collaboration
|
|
| n.合作，协作；勾结 | |
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|
392
favourably
|
|
| adv. 善意地，赞成地 =favorably | |
参考例句： |
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393
recipient
|
|
| a.接受的,感受性强的 n.接受者,感受者,容器 | |
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|
394
breweries
|
|
| 酿造厂，啤酒厂( brewery的名词复数 ) | |
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|
395
courteously
|
|
| adv.有礼貌地，亲切地 | |
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|
396
premises
|
|
| n.建筑物，房屋 | |
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|
397
demonstrations
|
|
| 证明( demonstration的名词复数 )； 表明； 表达； 游行示威 | |
参考例句： |
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|
398
impatience
|
|
| n.不耐烦，急躁 | |
参考例句： |
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|
399
approbation
|
|
| n.称赞；认可 | |
参考例句： |
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|
400
thoroughly
|
|
| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
参考例句： |
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|
401
confession
|
|
| n.自白，供认，承认 | |
参考例句： |
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|
402
filaments
|
|
| n.（电灯泡的）灯丝( filament的名词复数 )；丝极；细丝；丝状物 | |
参考例句： |
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|
403
morbid
|
|
| adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
404
brewed
|
|
| 调制( brew的过去式和过去分词 )； 酝酿； 沏（茶）； 煮（咖啡） | |
参考例句： |
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405
incurred
|
|
| [医]招致的，遭受的； incur的过去式 | |
参考例句： |
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|
406
revert
|
|
| v.恢复，复归，回到 | |
参考例句： |
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|
407
retrieving
|
|
| n.检索（过程），取还v.取回( retrieve的现在分词 )；恢复；寻回；检索（储存的信息） | |
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408
hierarchy
|
|
| n.等级制度；统治集团，领导层 | |
参考例句： |
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|
409
exterior
|
|
| adj.外部的，外在的；表面的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
410
brewing
|
|
| n. 酿造, 一次酿造的量 动词brew的现在分词形式 | |
参考例句： |
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|
411
justify
|
|
| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
参考例句： |
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|
412
conscientiously
|
|
| adv.凭良心地；认真地，负责尽职地；老老实实 | |
参考例句： |
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413
relaxation
|
|
| n.松弛，放松；休息；消遣；娱乐 | |
参考例句： |
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|
|
414
parasitic
|
|
| adj.寄生的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
415
dilate
|
|
| vt.使膨胀，使扩大 | |
参考例句： |
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|
416
refinement
|
|
| n.文雅；高尚；精美；精制；精炼 | |
参考例句： |
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|
417
decanted
|
|
| v.将（酒等）自瓶中倒入另一容器( decant的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
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418
vessels
|
|
| 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 | |
参考例句： |
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419
yeasts
|
|
| 酵母( yeast的名词复数 )； 酵母菌； 发面饼； 发酵粉 | |
参考例句： |
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|
420
speck
|
|
| n.微粒，小污点，小斑点 | |
参考例句： |
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|
421
negligence
|
|
| n.疏忽，玩忽，粗心大意 | |
参考例句： |
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|
422
inveterate
|
|
| adj.积习已深的，根深蒂固的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
423
formulated
|
|
| v.构想出( formulate的过去式和过去分词 )；规划；确切地阐述；用公式表示 | |
参考例句： |
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424
uncertainties
|
|
| 无把握( uncertainty的名词复数 )； 不确定； 变化不定； 无把握、不确定的事物 | |
参考例句： |
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|
425
swarming
|
|
| 密集( swarm的现在分词 )； 云集； 成群地移动； 蜜蜂或其他飞行昆虫成群地飞来飞去 | |
参考例句： |
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|
426
tiresome
|
|
| adj.令人疲劳的，令人厌倦的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
|
427
putrefaction
|
|
| n.腐坏，腐败 | |
参考例句： |
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|
|
428
prodigious
|
|
| adj.惊人的，奇妙的；异常的；巨大的；庞大的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
429
treatise
|
|
| n.专著；(专题)论文 | |
参考例句： |
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|
|
430
maker
|
|
| n.制造者，制造商 | |
参考例句： |
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|
431
adversary
|
|
| adj.敌手，对手 | |
参考例句： |
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|
432
alluded
|
|
| 提及，暗指( allude的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
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|
|
433
lactic
|
|
| adj.乳汁的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
|
434
transformation
|
|
| n.变化；改造；转变 | |
参考例句： |
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|
435
decomposition
|
|
| n. 分解, 腐烂, 崩溃 | |
参考例句： |
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|
436
derivatives
|
|
| n.衍生性金融商品；派生物，引出物( derivative的名词复数 )；导数 | |
参考例句： |
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|
437
engendered
|
|
| v.产生（某形势或状况），造成，引起( engender的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
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|
438
botanist
|
|
| n.植物学家 | |
参考例句： |
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|
|
439
invoked
|
|
| v.援引( invoke的过去式和过去分词 )；行使（权利等）；祈求救助；恳求 | |
参考例句： |
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|
440
treatises
|
|
| n.专题著作，专题论文，专著( treatise的名词复数 ) | |
参考例句： |
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|
441
superannuated
|
|
| adj.老朽的，退休的；v.因落后于时代而废除，勒令退学 | |
参考例句： |
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|
442
transformations
|
|
| n.变化( transformation的名词复数 )；转换；转换；变换 | |
参考例句： |
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|
443
surgical
|
|
| adj.外科的，外科医生的，手术上的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
444
epithet
|
|
| n.（用于褒贬人物等的）表述形容词，修饰语 | |
参考例句： |
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|
|
445
imploring
|
|
| 恳求的，哀求的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
446
hostility
|
|
| n.敌对，敌意；抵制［pl.］交战，战争 | |
参考例句： |
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|
447
misanthropical
|
|
参考例句： |
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|
448
divers
|
|
| adj.不同的；种种的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
449
suspense
|
|
| n.（对可能发生的事）紧张感，担心，挂虑 | |
参考例句： |
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|
450
scruples
|
|
| 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 ) | |
参考例句： |
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|
451
rectification
|
|
| n. 改正, 改订, 矫正 | |
参考例句： |
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|
452
dispense
|
|
| vt.分配，分发；配(药)，发(药)；实施 | |
参考例句： |
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|
|
453
experimentation
|
|
| n.实验，试验，实验法 | |
参考例句： |
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|
454
blessings
|
|
| n.（上帝的）祝福( blessing的名词复数 )；好事；福分；因祸得福 | |
参考例句： |
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|
455
germinating
|
|
| n.& adj.发芽（的）v.（使）发芽( germinate的现在分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
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|
456
utilize
|
|
| vt.使用，利用 | |
参考例句： |
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|
|
457
regenerating
|
|
| v.新生，再生( regenerate的现在分词 )；正反馈 | |
参考例句： |
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|
458
appreciable
|
|
| adj.明显的，可见的，可估量的，可觉察的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
459
asphyxiated
|
|
| v.渴望的，有抱负的，追求名誉或地位的( aspirant的过去式和过去分词 )；有志向或渴望获得…的人 | |
参考例句： |
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|
460
deprivation
|
|
| n.匮乏；丧失；夺去，贫困 | |
参考例句： |
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|
461
undoubtedly
|
|
| adv.确实地，无疑地 | |
参考例句： |
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|
462
concise
|
|
| adj.简洁的，简明的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
463
interpretation
|
|
| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
参考例句： |
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|
464
controversy
|
|
| n.争论，辩论，争吵 | |
参考例句： |
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|
465
insignificant
|
|
| adj.无关紧要的，可忽略的，无意义的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
466
intensity
|
|
| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
参考例句： |
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|
467
affinity
|
|
| n.亲和力，密切关系 | |
参考例句： |
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|
|
468
unstable
|
|
| adj.不稳定的，易变的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
469
scattering
|
|
| n.[物]散射；散乱，分散；在媒介质中的散播adj.散乱的；分散在不同范围的；广泛扩散的；（选票）数量分散的v.散射(scatter的ing形式)；散布；驱散 | |
参考例句： |
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|
470
attentive
|
|
| adj.注意的，专心的；关心(别人)的，殷勤的 | |
参考例句： |
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|
471
deference
|
|
| n.尊重，顺从；敬意 | |
参考例句： |
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|
472
partisans
|
|
| 游击队员( partisan的名词复数 )； 党人； 党羽； 帮伙 | |
参考例句： |
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|
473
renewals
|
|
| 重建( renewal的名词复数 )； 更新； 重生； 合同的续订 | |
参考例句： |
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|
474
alleged
|
|
| a.被指控的，嫌疑的 | |
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475
luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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476
uprooted
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| v.把（某物）连根拔起( uproot的过去式和过去分词 )；根除；赶走；把…赶出家园 | |
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