224 THE UFE OF PASTEUR 



makers, silkworm cultivators, vine growers, and brewers, lie 

 now wished to tackle what he had had in his mind since 1861 

 — ^the study of contagious diseases. Thus, with the consistent 

 logic of his mind, showing him as it did the possibility of 

 realizing in the future Robert Boyle's prophecy, he associated 

 the secret power of his feelings ; not to give those feelings their 

 share would be to leave one side of his nature entirely in the 

 shade. He had himself revealed this great factor in his char- 

 acter when he had said, *'It would indeed be a grand thing to 

 give the heart its share in the progress of science." He was 

 ever giving it a greater share in his work. 



His sorrows had only made him incline the more towards 

 the griefs of others. The memory of the children he had lost, 

 the mournings he had witnessed, caused him to passionately 

 desire that there might be fewer empty places in desolate 

 homes, and that this might be due to the application of methods 

 derived from his discoveries, of which he foresaw the immense 

 bearings on pathology. Beyond this, patriotism being for him 

 a ruling motive, he thought of the thousands of young men lost 

 to France every year, victims of the tiny germs of murderous 

 diseases. And, at the thought of epidemics and the heavy tax 

 they levy on the whole world, his compassion extended itself 

 to all human suffering. 



He regretted that he was not a medical man, fancying that 

 it might have facilitated his task. It was true that, at every 

 incursion on the domain of Medicine, he was looked upon as 

 a chemist — a chymiaster, some said — who was poaching on the 

 preserves of others. The distrust felt by the physicians in the 

 chemists was of a long standing. In the Traite de Therapeu- 

 tique, published in 1855 by Trousseau and Pidoux, we find 

 this passage: **When a chemist has seen the chemical condi- 

 tions of respiration, of digestion, or of the action of some drug, 

 he thinks he has given the theory of those functions and 

 phenomena. It is ever the same delusion which chemists will 

 never get over. We must make up our minds to that, but let 

 us beware of trying to profit by the precious researches which 

 they would probably never undertake if they were not stimu- 

 lated by the ambition of explaining what is outside their 

 range.'* Pidoux never retrenched anything from two other 

 phrases, also to be found in that same treatise : ' * Between a 

 physiological fact and a pathological fact there is the same dif- 

 ference as between a mineral and a vegetable"; and: **It is 



