LOUIS PASTEUR, AND LENGTHENED HUMAN 



LIFE 



BY OTIS W. CALDWELL, PH.D. 



Teachers College, Columbia University 



WHEN Louis Pasteur was sixteen years old his 

 father, anxious about his education, decided 

 to send him from the home town of Arbois 

 to Paris. The boy was to have the advantage of instruc- 

 tion in the ficole Normale, a school in which the father 

 thought there would be an exceptionally good oppor- 

 tunity for his boy since the Ecole Normale had been es- 

 tablished to train men for college positions. This was in 

 1838, when schools were not generally as good in France 

 as they are to-day. The elder Pasteur did not have 

 the privilege of much schooling but had gained a fair 

 education for his time by personal industry and efforts. 

 Like many a father of recent times, or to-day for that 

 matter, Louis' hardworking father decided that poverty 

 should not deprive his son of a good education, and thus 

 planned family sacrifices in the name of the boy's 

 education. That parental sacrifice does not guarantee 

 an education was as true of Louis Pasteur as it has 

 proved to be of many another boy or girl. No sooner 

 did the boy find himself at the school in Paris than an 

 old and honourable malady befell the boy homesick- 

 ness. It is honourable and eminently respectable to 



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