206 



THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



laboratory, and in a direction the fruitfulness of which I was 

 perhaps the first to point out. I had only conceived hopes, and 

 you bring us solid realities." 



In April, 1871, Pasteur, preoccupied with the future, and 

 ambitious for those who might come after him, wrote to Claude 

 Bernard: "Allow me to submit to you an idea which has 

 occurred to me, that of conferring on my dear pupil and friend 

 .Raulin the Experimental Physiology prize, for his splendid 

 work on the nutriment of mucors, or rather of a mucor, the ex- 

 cellence of which work has not escaped you. I doubt if you can 

 find anything better. I must tell you that this idea occurred 

 to me whilst reading your admirable report on the progress of 

 General Physiology in France. If therefore my suggestion 

 seems to you acceptable, you will have sown the germ of it in 

 my mind ; if you disapprove of it I shall make you partly 

 responsible." 



Claude Bernard hastened to reply : " You may depend upon 

 my support for your pupil M. Raulin. It will be for me both 

 B pleasure and a duty to support such excellent work and to 

 glorify the method of the master who inspired it." 



In his letter to Claude Bernard, Pasteur had added these 

 words : 'I have made up my mind to go and spend a few 

 months at Royat with my family, so as to be near my dear 

 Duclaux. We shall raise a few grammes of silkworm seed." 



M. Duclaux was then professor of chemistry at the Faculty 

 of Clermont Ferrand, a short distance from Royat, and Pasteur 

 intended to walk every day to the laboratory of his former pupil. 

 But M. Duclaux did not countenance this plan ; he meant to 

 entertain his master and his master's family in his own house, 

 25, Rue Montlosier, where he could even have one room 

 arranged as a silkworm nursery. He succeeded in persuading 

 Pasteur, and they organized a delightful home life which re- 

 called the days at Pont Gisquet before the war. 



Pasteur was seeking the means of making his seed-selecting 

 process applicable to small private nurseries as well as to large 

 industrial establishments. The only difficulty was the cost of 

 the indispensable microscope ; but Pasteur thought that each 

 village might possess its microscope, and that the village school- 

 master might be entrusted with the examination of the moths. 



In a letter written in April, 1871, to M. Bellotti, of the 

 Milan Civic Museum, Pasteur, after describing in a few lines 

 the simple process he had taken five years to study, added — 



