The Life of Jean Henri Fabre 



and obliged him to render an account of the at- 

 tempts made and the results obtained. 



To be sent to fight a fire and not to know what 

 fire is and to have no fire-engine or hose! It 

 needed Pasteur to accept and to shoulder such a 

 responsibility! . . . To his complaint that he had 

 no knowledge of the matter, Dumas had replied: 



"So much the better! You will have no ideas 

 on the subject but those that will come to you as 

 a result of your own observations! " 



This reply is not always a paradox, but one has 

 to be careful to whom one makes it ! x 



In this case the choice was not mistaken, 

 and the lesson was as profitable to Pasteur 

 as it was to Fabre, to whom he was about to 

 hand it on, all unsuspecting. 



When Pasteur was called upon to regener- 

 ate seri-culture, the silk-worm disease had 

 been known for twenty years. During that 

 period much research had been undertaken 

 and many efforts had been made, in France 

 as well as in Italy, to discover the nature of 

 the affection and to fight it. But " of all this 

 story, a mixture of truth and falsehood, Pas- 

 teur knew nothing when he began his re- 

 searches." More — and this was what aston- 

 ished Fabre — he knew nothing of the physi- 

 ology or the rearing of the silk-worm. " For 



1 Duclaux, Pasteur, Histoire d'un Esprit, pp. 182-93. 



l62 



