1865—1870 155 



him to embrace in succession every branch of the science he 

 teaches. ''But let him not give too frequent or too varied 

 lectures ! they paralyze the faculties, ' ' he said, being well 

 aware of the cost of preparing classes. He wished that towns 

 should be interested in the working and success of their scien- 

 tific establishments. The Universities of Paris, of Lvons, of 

 Strasburg, of Montpellier, of Lille, of Bordeaux, and of 

 Toulouse, forming as a whole the University of France, should 

 be connected to the neighbourhood which they honour in the 

 same way that German universities are connected with their 

 surroundings. 



Pasteur had the greatest admiration for the German system: 

 popular instruction literally provided, and, above it, an intel- 

 lectually independent higher teaching. Therefore, when the 

 University of Bonn resolved in that year, 1868, to offer him as 

 a great homage the degree of M.D. on account of his works 

 on micro-organisms, he was proud to see his researches rated 

 at their proper value by a neighbouring nation. He did not 

 then suspect the other side of German nature, the military 

 side, then very differently preoccupied. Those preoccupations 

 were pointed out to the French Government in a spirit of 

 prophecy, and with some patriotic anguish, by two French 

 officers, General Ducrot, commanding since 1865 the 6th Mili- 

 tary Division, whose headquarters were at Strasburg, and 

 Colonel Baron Stoffel, military attache in Prussia since 1866. 

 Their warnings were so little heeded that some Court intrigues 

 were even then on foot to transfer General Ducrot from Stras- 

 burg to Bourges, so that he might no longer worry people with 

 his monomania of Prussian ambition. 



On March 10, the evening of the day when the Emperor 

 decided upon making improvements, and when Duruy felt 

 assured, thanks to the promised allowances, that he could soon 

 -offer to French professors "the necessary appliances with 

 which to compete with their rivals beyond the Rhine," Pasteur 

 started for Alais, where his arrival was impatiently awaited, 

 both by partisans and adversaries of his experiments on silk- 

 worm disease. He would much have liked to give the results 

 of his work in his inaugural lecture at the Sorbonne. ''But," 

 he wrote to Duruy, "these are but selfishly sentimental 

 reasons, which must be outweighed by thje interest of my 

 researches." 



On his arrival he found to his joy that those who had pra<i 



