144 PASTEUR 



dering them with a smile. Ernest Renan wel- 

 comed Pasteur with words of graceful compli- 

 ment and noble distinction : 



"We are quite incompetent to bestow fitting 

 praise upon that which constitutes your true 

 glory/' he said, "those admirable experiments 

 through which you attain the very confines of 

 life, your ingenious fashion of interrogating 

 nature, which so many times has won from her 

 the clearest kind of replies, those precious dis- 

 coveries which, day by day, are being trans- 

 formed into conquests of the highest impor- 

 tance to humanity. You would repudiate our 

 praises, habituated as you are to value only the 

 judgments of your peers; and in the scientific 

 debates, aroused by this host of new ideas, you 

 would not care to see the appreciations of men 

 of letters intruding among the acclaims of sci- 

 entists related to you by the brotherhood of 

 glory and toil. Between you and your rival 

 scientists we have no right to intervene. But, 

 apart from the basis of science, which is not our 

 province, there is one criterion, Monsieur, in 



