CHARTER XV 

DISCUSSION WITH M. PASTEUR IN REFERENCE TO THE 
EXPERIMENTS RECORDED IN THE LAST CHAPTER, 
FOLLOWED BY THE APPOINTMENT OF A_ COM- 
MISSION BY THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF 
PARIS 
Oe July 10, 1876, an abridged account of the 
experiments recorded in the last chapter was 
read before the Academy of Sciences of Paris ;! 
this brought a reply from M. Pasteur on the follow- 
ing Monday, which was the beginning of a rather 
long discussion between us. Before referring to 
this discussion in some detail, it will be convenient 
first to refer to two attempts, made shortly afterwards 
in this country, to repeat my experiments. 
In the month of December two communications 
were sent to the Royal Society by Dr (afterwards Sir) 
William Roberts and by Professor Tyndall, giving 
an account of what they considered to be repetitions 
of my experiments. They, however, introduced two 
modifications, one of which so altered the conditions 
prescribed by me as to make it certain that their 
experiments would lead, as they did, to negative 
results. 
1A longer abstract of the original memoir had been published in 
Nature on July 6th, 1876. 
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