1882—1884 147 



be determined, and I will demonstrate to you that in every 

 case the blood of the corpse containing only charbon at the first 

 will also be septic on the next day. It will thus be established 

 with absolute certainty that the assertion formulated by me on 

 June 8, 1882, against which you have protested on two occa- 

 sions, arises, not as you say, from an arbitrary opinion, but 

 from an immovable scientific principle ; and that I have 

 legitimately affirmed from Paris the presence of septicaemia 

 without it being in the least necessary that I should have seen 

 the corpse of the sheep you utilized for your experiments. 



" Minutes of the facts as they are produced shall be drawn 

 up day by day, and signed by the professors of the Turin 

 Veterinary School and by the other persons, physicians or 

 veterinary surgeons, who may have been present at the experi- 

 ments ; these minutes will then be published both at the 

 Academies of Turin and of Paris." 



Pasteur contented himself with reading this letter to the 

 Academy of Sciences. For months he had not attended the 

 Academy of Medicine ; he was tired of incessant and barren 

 struggles ; he often used to come away from the discussions 

 worn out and excited. He would say to Messrs. Chamberland 

 and Eoux, who waited for him after the meetings, " How is it 

 that certain doctors do not understand the range, the value, of 

 our experiments? How is it that they do not foresee the great 

 future of all these studies? " 



The day after the Academie des Sciences meeting, judging 

 that his letter to Turin sufficiently closed the incident, Pasteur 

 started for Arbois. He wanted to set up a laboratory adjoining 

 his house. Where the father had worked with his hands, the 

 son would work at his great light-emitting studies. 



On April 3 a letter from M. Peter had been read at the 

 Academy of Medicine, declaring that he did not give up the 

 struggle and that nothing would be lost by waiting. 



At the following sitting, another physician, M. Fauvel, while 

 declaring himself an admirer of Pasteur's work and full of 

 respect for his person, thought it well not to accept blindly 

 all the inductions into which Pasteur might find himself drawn, 

 and to oppose those which were contradictory to acquired facts. 

 After M. Fauvel, M. Peter violently attacked what he called 

 "microbicidal drugs which may become homicidal," he said. 

 When reading the account of this meeting, Pasteur had an 

 impulse of anger. His resolutions not to return to the 



b B 



