DISCUSSION WITH POUCHET 105 



Now that the dust of combat has fallen, it is curious to 

 pass in review the events of the strife, of which, further- 

 more, Pasteur bore the brunt. We shall discover a 

 Pasteur whom we have not yet known; a vigorous and 

 sometimes a hot-headed polemic, a cautious polemic 

 also, who profits by what his adversaries teach him. 



I shall pass rapidly over the long discussion, opened 

 with Pouchet in the first place, then with Pouchet, Joly 

 and Musset. This discussion created a great deal of 

 stir in its time, but science did not derive from it any 

 new truth. In order to obtain a spark, it is necessary 

 to have the friction of iron against flint; here there was 

 only that of iron on punk. Pouchet was a conscientious, 

 erudite naturalist, animated by a desire to arrive at the 

 truth, but impelled by the nature of his mind outside 

 the only paths where it is to be found. He portrays 

 himself exactly in the second line of the preface of his 

 Traite de Vheterogenie, pubhshed in 1859. "When by 

 meditation," he says, "it became evident to me that 

 spontaneous generation was another one of the means 

 which nature employs for the reproduction of her crea- 

 tures, I applied myself to discover by what processes one 

 could demonstrate the phenomena." I picture to my- 

 self how Pasteur, as well as Tyndall later, must have 

 read these lines with stupefaction. Thus, behold a 

 scientific man who calls on experiment to prove a truth 

 which he considers in advance as certain what shall I 

 say as evident, although he has reached it only by 

 meditation! How much in accord here are this extra- 

 ordinary mind and extraordinary language! Tyndall 

 has remarked that it would have required a very powerful 

 bridle to hold in check a mind so strongly biased. Now, 

 not only was Pouchet incapable of profiting by the results 

 of a well-performed experiment, but he was a very medi- 

 ocre experimenter whenever he left the domain of natural 



