OTHER NEW EXPERIMENTS 177 

urine as to cause the potash to be in distinct excess 
when added thereto—a cause of failure which, all 
along, I had suggested to him. | 
Now let us turn to Pasteur’s own interpretation 
of what he considered to be his success and my 
failure. It will be borne in mind that in the dis- 
cussion which occurred between us, before the appoint- 
ment of the Commission, he invariably attributed my 
results to fertilisation of the boiled urine (which he 
still believed to be germless) by the addition of boiled 
liquor potasse. The living germs were ¢here, as 
he intimated over and over again. And when he 
twice declared that, operating as I did, it was a 
fact that organisms were most frequently to be 
found in the fluids, it looks as if he said so from 
sheer confidence in the conclusions he had arrived 
at in 1862. Thus, even boiled liquor potassz was, 
to him, only like one of the fluids he had dealt with 
at that time, and, as an alkaline fluid, had allowed 
germs to survive therein at a heat of 100° C. A 
truly amazing supposition. 
But now, in his final proof of ‘“ my errors,” as per- 
formed before the Commission and published in the 
Comptes Rendus, not a word is said in favour of 
this interpretation. A totally new point of view 
is adopted. He says there were three possible 
causes of error in my experiment: (1) not using a 
sufficiently acid urine; (2) not heating the potash 
sufficiently ; and (3) not having purified the vessels 
employed, by previously super-heating them. He 
said he was then satisfied that the first two causes 
M 
