NEW CONCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE 



Berthelot is other than the most intensely practical 

 of men. Was it not his prevision that gave us ten 

 or twelve years ago a glimpse of that earth of the 

 future when our farms will be turned into parks 

 and the food of our tables will come no longer 

 from the fields but from the laboratory, as* the 

 most delicate perfumes, the dazzling colors of 

 dyes, the drugs that lull our nerves to sleep come 

 now? The little phial or the pellets in which we 

 are to carry about a vest-pocket dinner are M. 

 Berthelot's own. From this engaging fancy his 

 bold imagination has looked forward to the day 

 when, from the test-tube and its mixtures, life it- 

 self may come. Looking back over the fifty years of 

 his scientific career, such a dream seems not more 

 daring than was his proposal to fabricate in his 

 laboratory the products of life, when he began. 



The rude sketch of M. Berthelot's wholly scien- 

 tific work, covering, though it does, more than is 

 crowded ordinarily in several lives, yet reveals but 

 a part of his amazing activity. It is almost un- 

 believable that this unwearied investigator in so 

 many paths of research, who has performed with 

 his own hands such a countless number of experi- 

 ments, who has prepared six hundred memoirs of 

 his work and published fifteen or twenty huge 

 technical works, could find time amid all this, and 

 his lectures, and the ordinary cares of family life, 



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