SPONTANEOUS GENERATION 97 



ness of the weather. But when warm weather 

 came they refused to comply with the conditions 

 laid down by the Commission, which presented a 

 report favorable to Pasteur. 



The heterogenesists still continued the discussion, 

 and it was a number of years before the question 

 was cleared up to the satisfaction of the most com- 

 petent judges. In the light of what is now known 

 it is not improbable that Pasteur's opponents would 

 have been able to repeat their experiments before 

 the Commission of the Academy with the results 

 which they had predicted, and Pasteur, although 

 right in his fundamental contention, would prob- 

 ably have been unable to refute them. Truth is 

 sometimes very elusive, and nowhere more so than 

 in this field. The positive results obtained by 

 Pouchet and his co-workers under conditions in 

 which Pasteur was unable to obtain any traces of 

 life were probably not due, as Pasteur thought, to 

 faulty technique, but to a fact then unknown to 

 both parties, i.e. ; that certain forms of life may 

 resist prolonged boiling without being killed. This 

 is demonstrably true of the spores of the hay 

 bacillus, and it is significant that Pouchet worked 

 with infusions of hay, while Pasteur employed a 

 decoction of yeast and various other infusions. 



