SKETCH OF M. LOUIS PASTEUR. 823 



Twelfth month (Sada), forty-one days, from the 11th of May till 

 the 20th of June. The Pleiades may he seen at half past five in the 

 morning, a little later Orion. The rice-harvest is finished, cotton and 

 indigo are planted, and the ground is prepared for maize. The shadow 

 measures three feet south, and the sun goes to its northernmost point. 



Such, according to our Dutch author, is the calendar of the Ja- 

 vanese. It furnishes a series of careful observations such as we meet 

 only among a primitive people. It also affords numerous examples of 

 the peculiarities not only of the starry skies of the tropics, but also of 

 the meteorological conditions and the properties of tropical vegetation. 

 Die Natur. 



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SKETCH OF M. LOUIS PASTEUR. 



LOUIS PASTEUR, the distinguished French chemist and author 

 of researches in fermentation and the germs of disease which 

 have been fruitful in valuable discoveries, was born at Dole, in the 

 Jura, December 27, 1822. He entered the university in 1840, be- 

 came a supernumerary Master of Studies at the College of Besancon, 

 was received as a pupil in the Ecole Normal e in 1843, took the degree 

 of Doctor in 1847, and was appointed Professor of Physics in the 

 Faculty of Sciences at Dijon in 1848, and of Chemistry at Strasburg, 

 in 1849. In 1854 he was appointed Dean of the newly created Faculty 

 of Sciences at Lille, and was intrusted with the duty of organizing it. 

 In 1857 he returned to Paris, and became Scientific Director of the 

 Ecole Normale. In December, 1863, he was appointed Professor of 

 Geology, Physics, and Chemistry at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts, and 

 was elected a member of the Institute. He has written numerous 

 works relating to chemistry, and has contributed much to the " Re- 

 cueil des Savants Etrangers " and the "Annales de Chimie et de 

 Physique " ; and for his researches relative to the polarization of 

 light he received, in 1856, the Rumford medal from the Royal So- 

 ciety of London. His work in pure chemistry, however meritorious, 

 and brilliant enough though it was, has been eclipsed by his vastly 

 more important and more fruitful reseaches in fermentation ; into 

 the causes of certain diseases of plants, animals, and man; and into 

 the modes of reproduction of the lower organisms (or the theory of 

 spontaneous generation), and the parts which those lower organisms 

 play in the production of chemical changes, and in the origination and 

 spread of disease in which field he may almost be said to have con- 

 stituted a new science, and has certainly performed a work of incal- 

 culable benefit to mankind. These investigations have been pursued 

 under the light of the theory, to which their results in turn have 

 given additional force, that all fermentations are processes connected 

 with life, and that this life and any life is not of spontaneous pro- 



