148 PASTEUR : THE HISTORY OF A MIND 



in the laboratory, where his assistants saw only the ex- 

 terior and the skeleton of his experiments, without any 

 of the life which animated them. Here, on the contrary, 

 he was under obligation as soon as he had found out 

 something to speak and to excite the public judgment 

 and that of industrial practice on all his laboratory 

 discoveries. 



A hard necessity, that of laboring thus under the public 

 eye, with an official connection, in the presence of a men- 

 acing danger which one has been commissioned to exor- 

 cise! To be sent to combat a conflagration, and not to 

 know where the fire is, and not to have any pumps! One 

 must be a Pasteur to accept such a responsibility and 

 carry it off successfully. In any event, we owe to this 

 condition of things a multiplicity of documents: reports 

 to the Academy of Sciences, to the Minister of Agri- 

 culture, letters to M. Dumas, communications to the 

 journals of silk culture, and we can make use of all these 

 signed writings of Pasteur to reconstruct the history of 

 his thought. He has himself authorized us to consult 

 them by inserting them at the end of the second volume 

 of his Etudes sur la maladie des vers a soie. "I might 

 have dispensed with reproducing in toto these pub- 

 lications," he says, "since the first volume contains the 

 definite expression of my actual ideas; but I have thought 

 that they might be of some historical interest and serve 

 as an example in a difficult and long-winded subject 

 of the progressive march of ideas in proportion as the 

 observer multiplies his experiments. 



"'Let us gather together some facts in order to have 

 some ideas' said Buffon. It is not without utility to 

 show to the man of the world or to the practical man 

 at what cost science conquers principles the simplest and 

 most modest in appearance." 1 



1 fitude sur la maladie des vers a soir, t. II, p. 155. 



