A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



As we move among this light-hearted and light- 

 headed throng we shall scarcely escape a feeling of 

 good-humored contempt for what seems an inferior 

 race. It will be wholesome, therefore, for us to turn 

 aside from the boulevard into the Rue Dotot, which 

 leads from it near its centre, and walk a few hundred 

 yards away from the pleasure-seekers, where an evi- 

 dence of a quite different and a no less characteristic 

 phase of the national psychology will be before us. For 

 here, within easy sound of the jangling discords of the or- 

 gans that keep time for the march of the cheveaux de bois, 

 rises up a building that is in a sense the monument of 

 a man who was brother in blood and in sentiment to 

 the revellers we have just left in the boulevard, yet 

 whose career stamped him as one of the greatest men 

 of genius of any race or any time. That man was 

 Louis Pasteur. The building before us is the famous 

 institute that bears his name. 



In itself this building is a simple and unimposing 

 structure, yet of pleasing contour. It is as well placed 

 as the surroundings permit, on a grassed terrace, a 

 little back from the street, where a high iron fence 

 guards it and gives it a degree of seclusion. There are 

 other buildings visible in the rear, which, as one learns 

 on entering, are laboratories and the like, where the 

 rabbits and guinea-pigs and dogs that are so essential 

 to the work of the laboratory are kept. On the terrace 

 in front is a bronze statue of a boy struggling with a 

 rabid dog a reminder of the particular labor of the 

 master-worker which led directly to the foundation 

 of the institution. It will be remembered that it was 

 primarily to give Pasteur a wider opportunity to apply 



1 80 



