288 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



experimental study of germs, the more we perceive sudden 

 lights and clear ideas on the knowledge of the causes of con- 

 tagious diseases! Is it not worthy of attention that, in that 

 Arbois vineyard (and it would be true of the million hectares 

 of vineyards of all the countries in the world) , there should not 

 have been, at the time when I made the aforesaid experiments, 

 one single particle of earth which would not have been capable 

 of provoking fermentation by a grape yeast, and that, on the 

 other hand, the earth of the glass houses I have mentioned 

 should have been powerless to fulfil that office? And why? 

 Because, at a given moment, I covered that earth with some 

 glass. The death, if I may so express it, of a bunch of grapes 

 thrown at that time on any vineyard, would infallibly have 

 occurred through the saccharomyces parasites of which I speak ; 

 that kind of death would have been impossible, on the contrary, 

 on the little space enclosed by my glass houses. Those few 

 cubic yards of air, those few square yards of soil, were there, 

 in the midst of a universal possible contagion, and they were 

 safe from it." 



And suddenly looking beyond those questions of yeast and 

 vintage, towards the germs of disease and of death : "Is it 

 not permissible to believe, by analogy, that a day will come 

 when easily applied preventive measures will arrest those 

 scourges which suddenly desolate and terrify populations ; such 

 as the fearful disease (yellow fever) which has recently invaded 

 Senegal and the valley of the Mississippi, or that other (bubonic 

 plague), yet more terrible perhaps, which has ravaged the banks 

 of the Volga/' 



Pasteur, with his quick answers, his tenacious refutations, 

 was looked upon as a great fighter by his colleagues at the 

 Academy, but in the laboratory, while seeking Claude Ber- 

 nard's soluble ferment, he tackled subjects from which he drew 

 conclusions which were amazing to physicians. 



A worker in the laboratory had had a series of furuncles. 

 Pasteur, whose proverb was " Seek the microbe," asked him- 

 self whether the pus of furuncles might not have an organism, 

 which, carried to and fro, for it may be said that a furuncle 

 never comes alone would explain the centre of inflammation 

 and the recurrence of the furuncles. After abstracting with 

 the usual purity precautions some pus from three successive 

 furuncles, he found in some sterilized broth a microbe, formed 

 of little rounded specks which clustered to the sides of the 



