942 
forgotten. It is somewhat as if geography were 
to be taught by traveling; such geography is 
remembered because one has seen the places. In 
the same way your sons will not forget what the 
air we breathe contains when they have once 
analyzed it, when in their hands and under their 
eyes the admirable properties of its elements have 
been resolved.? 
Pasteur was a chemist, a physical chem- 
ist, if you will, and his illustrations were 
drawn from the realms of physics and 
chemistry, but if one substitutes for ‘‘elec- 
tric telegraph’’ any piece of apparatus now 
in use in a medical laboratory or a hospital, 
the principle of the better type of modern 
medical instruction is embodied in his argu- 
ment. He was talking to those who, after 
two years of practical and theoretical 
study, were to enter industrial careers as 
overseers and foremen in factories, foun- 
dries and distilleries. But neither time nor 
circumstance fundamentally alters the ap- 
plicableness of his observations. After 
sixty years we may still urge his thought 
as the soundest of principles in the better 
education of men and women who are ulti- 
mately imtended to enter careers as our 
overseers in matters of health and disease 
and as the foremen of public hygiene. 
Have our present-day medical schools suc- 
ceeded in bringing to the training of their 
students the same practical and scientific 
thoroughness which Pasteur demanded for 
students in the industrial sciences and 
which students of the latter sciences now 
procure? If not, where lies the fault; in 
the college or the medical school, in the 
state or the public? Or are all more or less 
to blame? These questions will be dis- 
cussed in due time, but first, let us turn to 
Pasteur’s other proposition, investigation 
for its own sake. After stating his wish to 
be directly useful, personally and through 
*Vallery-Radot, ‘‘The Life of Pasteur,’’? Mce- 
Clure, Phillips & Co., New York, 1902. 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 912 
his laboratory, to the industries of Lille, he 
says: 
Without theory, practise is but routine born of 
habit. Theory alone can bring forth and develop 
the spirit of invention. It is to you specially that 
it will belong not to share the opinion of those 
narrow minds who disdain everything in science 
which has not immediate application. You know 
Franklin’s charming saying? He was witnessing 
the first demonstration of a purely scientific dis- 
covery, and people round him said: ‘‘ But what is 
the use of it?’’? Franklin answered them: ‘‘ What 
is the use of a new-born child?’’ 
Do you know when this electric telegraph, one 
of the most marvelous applications of modern 
science, first saw the light? It was in the mem- 
orable year 1822; Oersted, a Danish physicist, 
held in his hands a piece of copper wire, joined 
by its extremities to the two poles of a Volta pile. 
On his table was a magnetized needle on its pivot, 
and he suddenly saw (by chance you will say, but 
chance favors only the mind which is prepared) 
the needle move and take up a position quite 
different from the one assigned to it by terrestrial 
magnetism. A wire carrying an electric current 
deviated a magnetized needle from its position! 
That, gentlemen, was the birth of the modern 
telegraph. Franklin’s interlocutor might well have 
said when the needle moved ‘‘ But what is the use 
of that?’’ And yet that discovery was barely 
twenty years old when it produced by its applica- 
tion the almost supernatural effects of the electric 
telegraph! 
This, gentlemen, may seem trite to you, 
for it is an argument oft repeated, but its 
significance, as far as medicine is con- 
cerned, lies in the fact that at the time 
Pasteur made these statements modern 
medical investigation was just beginning. 
The celebrated physiological institute at 
Berlin had been in existence only sixteen 
years; Schwann, following Schleiden, had 
elaborated the cell doctrine only fifteen 
years before and anesthesia had been prac- 
tised for only six years. Claude Bernard 
was in the midst (1850-60) of his impor- 
tant discoveries concerning the pancreatic 
juice, the glycogenic function of the liver 
and the vasomotor system; three years were 
