58 PASTEUR 



court. Even the scientific side of his mind 

 found employment in his administrative role: 

 for instance, when he undertook comparative 

 calculations as to the number of ounces of meat 

 furnished for each meal to the students at the 

 Normale and the Poly technique ! 



This anxiety to be a good administrator in 

 no wise interfered with his researches. He ac- 

 cepted the additional burden without com- 

 plaint, and his scientific activity was in no wise 

 retarded. In the same manner that crystals 

 led him to fermentations it was these latter 

 which were destined to lead him to studies 

 which seemed to overstep the boundary of sci- 

 ence and to enter the metaphysical domain of 

 the origins of life, the solution of which had 

 hitherto been the concern of philosophers 

 rather than of scientists. When Pasteur saw, 

 under the lens of a microscope, cells of yeast 

 conducting themselves like living organisms, 

 when he saw the vibrions moving, growing and 

 dying, he straightway asked himself where these 

 yeasts and these vibrions come from. Are they 



