836 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. VII. No. 181. 



it not more importaut to commend tlie great 

 labor which he has bestowed upon it, than to 

 search for the little errors that are unavoidable 

 in every attempt to cover a field extending so far 

 beyond the possible limits of any one entomolo- 

 gist's experience. Our critical inclination gives 

 way to our gratitude to Professor Packard for 

 having accomplished so well what very few 

 would have the courage to undertake, and 

 fewer still the ability and preparation to exe- 

 cute. With the books of Professors Packard, 

 Comstock and Sharp on his shelves, the be- 

 ginning entomologist of to-day will find before 

 him a short and pleasant path to a knowledge 

 of his subject instead of the long and tortuous 

 course which many American entomologists have 

 had to pursue. With these works the ' modern 

 morphologist,' who is often not a little proud 

 of knowing nothing about Hexapods, can fill a 

 gap in his library, if not in his information. The 

 wide-awake morphologist or physiologist who 

 turns the pages of these works will see sugges- 

 tions of many great problems and of greater 

 opportunities for work than he may be able to 

 find in the more limited and more nearly ex- 

 hausted fields of annelid and vertebrate mor- 

 phology. Insects have been long and lovingly 

 studied, but we have scarcely begun to know 

 more than a few superficial facts concerning 

 them. Professor Packard's book, we venture 

 to predict, will, in the course of time, attract 

 many American students to the study of the 

 intricate organization and development of in- 

 sects and thereby lead indirectly but surely to 

 an increase of our knowledge. 



William Moeton Wheeler. 



Pasteur. By Percy Frankland and Mrs. 



Percy Frankland. New York, The Mac- 



millan Company. 1898. Pp. 224. Price, 



$1.25. 



Of few men of science can it be said more 

 truly than of Pasteur that the story of his life 

 is found in his work. Judged by ordinary 

 standards his life itself was not an eventful one, 

 and the simple record of his scientific achieve- 

 ments constitutes perforce the larger part of 

 any biography. In order to understand what 

 significance these achievements possessed for 

 Pasteur's contemporaries and what they mean 



to his successors it is necessary to correlate the 

 discoveries made by Pasteur both with the con- 

 dition of science in his time and with our 

 present knowledge, and the deftness with 

 which such a relation is traced becomes a fair 

 measure of the biographer's success. For this 

 task the present biographers are unusually 

 well equipped, and they have approached the 

 subject with an appreciation of the simplicity 

 of the man and the dignity of his undertakings 

 that has given us a most readable account of 

 the life-work of the great master. 



Louis Pasteur was born at Dole on the 27th 

 of December, 1822, and was of humble origin, 

 his father being the owner of a small tannery. 

 By dint of great sacrifices on the part of his 

 parents, Louis was given early opportunities 

 for study, and the boy soon attracted the atten- 

 tion of his teachers through his great diligence, 

 energy and enthusiasm. When he was twenty- 

 one years of age he went up to Paris to the 

 Ecole Normale and threw himself almost at 

 once Into the work of investigation. He fell 

 first under the influence of Biot and began that 

 study of the crystals of tartaric acid which led 

 to the remarkable discovery «of the spatial rela- 

 tions subsisting between the atoms within the 

 molecule and blazed the way for the fruitful 

 generalizations of stereo-chemistry. 



M. Duclaux, in his admirable book, ' Pasteur : 

 Histoire d'un Esprit,' has recently grouped 

 Pasteur's researches under eight heads : Studies 

 in Crystallography, The Lactic and Alcoholic 

 Fermentations, Spoptaneous Generation, Re- 

 searches upon the Diseases of Wine and Vin- 

 egar, The Silkworm Disease, Studies on Beer, 

 The Etiology of Infectious Diseases and Re- 

 searches upon Vaccines, and our authors have 

 in the main followed this grouping. It may 

 be doubted if the history of science offers a bet- 

 ter illustration of the way in which scientific 

 research carries a worker irresistibly along on 

 its own current, sometimes rendering him a 

 foiled, circuitous wanderer, sometimes, as with 

 Pasteur, leading from one channel into another 

 with the horizon always widening out as the 

 water deepens around him. 



That perennially interesting subject, Pas- 

 teur's controversy with Liebig over the theory 

 of fermentation and decay, is treated by our 



