1860—1864 107 



Alexandre Dumas senior, George Sand, Princess Mathilde, 

 were being pointed out. Around them, the inevitable 

 ' smart " people who must see everything and be seen every- 

 where, without whom no function favoured by fashion 

 would be complete; in short what is known as the "Tout 

 Paris." But this " Tout Paris " was about to receive a novel 

 impression, probably a lasting one. The man who stood 

 before this fashionable audience was not one of those 

 speakers who attempt by an insinuating exordium to gain 

 the good graces of their hearers ; it was a grave-looking 

 man, his face full of quiet energy and reflective force. He 

 began in a deep, firm voice, evidently earnestly convinced 

 of the greatness of his mission as a teacher : ' ' Great pro- 

 blems are now being handled, keeping every thinking man in 

 suspense ; the unity or multiplicity of human races ; the 

 creation of man 1,000 years or 1,000 centuries ago, the 

 fixity of species, or the slow and progressive transformation 

 of one species into another ; the eternity of matter ; the idea 

 of a God unnecessary. Such are some of the questions that 

 humanity discusses nowadays." 



He had now, he continued, entered upon a subject ac- 

 cessible to experimentation, and which he had made the object 

 of the strictest and most conscientious studies. Can matter 

 organize itself? Can living beings come into the world 

 without having been preceded by beings similar to them? After 

 showing that the doctrine of spontaneous generation had 

 gradually lost ground, he explained how the invention of 

 the microscope had caused it to reappear at the end of the 

 seventeenth century, " in the face of those beings, so numer- 

 ous, so varied, so strange in their shapes, the origin of which 

 was connected with the presence of all dead vegetable and 

 animal matter in a state of disorganization." He went on 

 to say how Pouchet had taken up this study, and to point 

 out the errors that this new partisan of an old doctrine had 

 committed, errors difficult to recognize at first. With perfect 

 clearness and simplicity, Pasteur explained how the dusts which 

 are suspended in air contain germs of inferior organized beings 

 and how a liquid preserved, by certain precautions, from the 

 contact of these germs can be kept indefinitely, giving his 

 audience a glimpse of his laboratory methods. 



"Here," he said, "is an infusion of organic matter, as- 

 limpid as distilled water, and extremely alterable. It has been 



