110 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



last letter is not worthy of a man of science. Keep but three 

 objects before your eyes : your class, your pupils and the work 

 you have begun. . . . Do your duty to the best of your ability, 

 without troubling about the rest." 



Pasteur undertook the rest himself. He went to the Ministry 

 to complain of the injustice and unfairness, from a general point 

 of view, of that nomination. 



" Sir," answered the Chaumont exile, " I have received your 

 kind letter. My deep respect for every word of yours will 

 guarantee my intention to follow your advice. I have given 

 myself up entirely to my class. I have found here a Physics 

 cabinet in a deplorable state, and I have undertaken to re- 

 organise it." 



He had not time to finish : justice was done, and Paul Dalimier 

 ;vas made maitre des conferences at the Ecole Normale. He 

 died at twenty -eight. 



The wish that masters and pupils should remain in touch 

 with each other after the three years at the Ecole Normale had 

 already in 1859 inspired Pasteur to write a report on the desir- 

 ableness of an annual report entitled, Scientific Annals of the 

 Ecole Normale. 



The initiative of pregnant ideas often is traced back to 

 France. But, through want of tenacity, she allows those same 

 ideas to fall into decay and they are taken up by other nations, 

 transplanted, developed, until they come back unrecognized to 

 their mother country. Germany had seen the possibilities of 

 such a publication as Pasteur's projected Annals. Eenan wrote 

 about that time to the editors of the Revue Germanique, a 

 Review intended to draw France and Germany together : "In 

 France, nothing is made public until achieved and ripened. 

 In Germany, a work is given out provisionally, not as a teach- 

 ing, but as an incitement to think, as a ferment for the mind." 



Pasteur felt all the power of that intellectual ferment. In 

 the volume entitled Centenary of the Ecole Normale, M. Gernez 

 has recalled Pasteur's enthusiasm when he spoke of those 

 Annals. Was it not for former pupils, away in the provinces, 

 a means of collaborating with their old masters and of keep- 

 ing in touch with Paris? 



It was in June, 1864, that Pasteur presented the first 

 number of this publication to the Academic des Sciences. M. 

 Gernez, who was highly thought of by Pasteur, has not related 

 in the Centenary that the book opened with some of his own 



