16 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LII. No. 1331 



lation are unusual books. The conception is 

 not tliat of a mere biography of Pasteur. It 

 is, indeed, that in part, but Duclaux under- 

 took the greater and subtler thing, an inter- 

 pretation of the master mind, the dominant 

 soul, the " histoire d' un esprit." His success 

 in this is the thing which gave remarkable 

 power to the French edition. While perhaps, 

 as the translators state, something of the 

 verbal force and charm of the original is 

 inevitably lost in its transfer to English, yet 

 there are in this translation some noteworthy 

 gains which to the reviewer are fully com- 

 pensatory. 



In the first place, this English edition con- 

 tains probably the finest and certainly the 

 most complete series of portraits of Pasteur 

 that has ever been published. There are four- 

 teen of these, picturing him from early 

 manhood to his later maturity. Pasteur's 

 face and especially his eyes were vmusually 

 expressive and one traces in these portraits 

 almost more surely, and certainly more 

 quickly, than in the text the traits or moods 

 belonging to the different periods of his life— 

 the student, the crusader, the laureled victor. 



Pasteur's life was dramatic. This was 

 recently brought out with remarkable vivid- 

 ness by the French playwright Sacha Guitry.^ 



Duclaux in his " histoire d'un esprit " with 

 a dramatist's skill selected successively the 

 epochal events which crowded in succession 

 through Pasteur's career from his apprentice- 

 ship days in I'ecole normale at Paris. These 

 author's pictures serve also to portray vividly 

 the direct bearing of Pasteur's early training 

 in physics and especially in chemistry upon 

 his later work on fermentation and other 

 aspects of bacteriology. The reader is shown 

 with almost kaleidoscopic abruptness first one 

 picture then another, yet always with a dra- 

 matic unity since Pasteur is always the 

 central figure. It is first Pasteur's works in 

 crystallography, then in lactic and alcoholic 

 fermentation, spontaneous generation, wines 

 and vinegars, diseases of the silkworm, yeasts 

 and brewing, etiology of microbial diseases, 



2 Sacha Guitry, Pasteur. Pi6ee en 5 aetes. La 

 Petite IllustTation Thfeatrale. March, 1919. 



and finally the evolution of his work on 

 viruses and vaccines including his studies on 

 chicken cholera, rabies and the problems of 

 immunity. 



In this way the reader is given a synoptical 

 survey of the period which marked the transi- 

 tion from the dominance of Liebig's chemical 

 theories of fermentation to the full acceptance 

 of the modern organic conception, i. e., from 

 the dominance of philosophical empiricism in 

 biology and medicine to the full acceptance 

 of the modern leadership of the laboratory 

 investigator, trusting only the experimental 

 method. 



Duclaux's fitness for the task of portraying 

 this with such remarkable vividness in so 

 compact a volume is clearly shown in the 

 senior translator's introduction of some thirty 

 pages, which is a valuable contribution to the 

 literature of biological history. It is prefaced 

 by a portrait of Duclaux showing his alertly 

 intellectual face at about the period 1897, 

 when, upon the death of the master, he suc- 

 ceeded him as director of the Pasteur Institute, 

 and is followed by another showing the care- 

 worn man in the last year of his life. 



In this preface one traces Duclaux's 

 intimate relationship with Pasteur from his 

 enrollment as a student in the normal school 

 at Paris in 1858 where " the master " was in 

 charge of chemisti-y and the related scientific 

 studies to the death of Pasteur in 1895 — 37 

 years. Here he and the other young labora- 

 tory assistants played their part as armor 

 bearers in the heroic times of the early 

 Pasteurian struggle. " The master was in the 

 forefront of the conflict over molecular dis- 

 symmetry in crystals, the campaign on fer- 

 mentations and the great battle over spon- 

 taneous generation." Duclaux, who was him- 

 self trained early as a chemist, analyzes 

 Pasteur's mental attitude on these questions 

 with keen facility, l^or can we overlook the 

 fact that this English edition has been en- 

 riched throughout because of the like fitness 

 of the translators for their task. Smith has 

 always been chemically minded in his ap- 

 proach to his bacteriological problems. More- 

 over, while Duclaux is a remarkably well in- 



