Mat 12, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



501 



through the chemistry of fermentation to the 

 bacteria of fermentation, and thence to the 

 organisms of disease, and to-day the appre- 

 ciation of the practical value of Pasteur's work 

 is universal. 



We may be told that Pasteur could have 

 started midway in his career if some one had 

 put him there at the outset by advice; and if 

 we reply that there was no such person to ad- 

 vise him, we may be reminded that there are 

 plenty of advisei-s to-day. These advisers are 

 precisely the foundation on which those who 

 decry the uselessness of many present investi- 

 gations propose to build a system in which 

 only useful and important projects are under- 

 taken. Granted an abundance of omniscient 

 advisers, their plan should work; but if these 

 foundation stones prove defective, the struc- 

 ture resting on them will fall. How readily 

 such advisers may be discovered and drafted 

 into sei'vice is perhaps capable of computation. 

 No doubt each person who proposes to elim- 

 inate uselessness in research has in mind at 

 least one who is able and willing to undertake 

 the task of elimination. Otherwise the proposal 

 would hardly be made. One need, therefore, 

 only count the number of those who would dis- 

 pense with impractical investigation to deter- 

 mine the minimum number of advisers with 

 which the system might start. Probably there 

 are others having ability, but also modesty, 

 who can not be immediately discovered. So 

 far as I know no one has attempted to deter- 

 mine how much leadership a federation to pre- 

 vent uselessness in research might count upon. 



There is danger in this connection that the 

 controlling factor of a career be misjudged. 

 Careers are only occasionally guided by advice ; 

 for the rest, they are the product of evolution. 

 Each step depends on what has gone before, 

 and determines what shall come after. Granted 

 the characteristics with which Pasteur's parents 

 endowed him, his life proceeded naturally from 

 one thing to another. One need not be a 

 fatalist to conceive that the only way for him 

 to end with proof of the germ theory of dis- 

 ease was to start with isomerism in tartaric 

 acids. Had he been artificially set down at 

 some mile-post on the way, without having 

 traversed the preceding distances, it is ques- 

 tionable whether he could have been made to 



follow the same road, even with the help of 

 advice from those who believed they were qual- 

 ified to give it. Without the abiding faith that 

 he was on the right road, which only his own 

 previous work, not the suggestions of his 

 elders, could give him, it is scarcely likely he 

 would have persevered through the long periods 

 of discouragement. To him who asserts that 

 Pasteur could have been put upon the problem 

 of pathogenic organisms in his early days and 

 have reached the goal of his maturity at an 

 earlier date, the only suitable reply seems to 

 be the verse which might prove to have apos- 

 tolic origin if the Scriptures recorded every- 

 thing, "Verily, optimism hath its own reward." 



Had Pasteur's hypothetical early start on 

 pathogenic organisms failed to lead him to the 

 present conception of the etiology of disease, 

 what would have been the damage? Would 

 the world simply have lost Pasteur, and never 

 been the wiser, in the same manner as it has 

 probably lost many another genius, perhaps 

 through mistaken advice coming from those 

 who were supposed to know? Could humanity 

 have counted on a substitute for Pasteur, aris- 

 ing at an equally early date and arriving, either 

 with or without advice from superiors, at the 

 same conclusions as Pasteur reached? It is 

 not likely. Failure to discover the truth by 

 Pasteur would have been a calamity. His 

 work would have been careful, painstaking. 

 Everyone watching his later career would have 

 recognized that his work on the theory of 

 pathogenic organisms must have been thor- 

 ough. But, owing to immaturity, or want of 

 perseverance because he lacked the faith in his 

 own hypotheses which only gradual develop- 

 ment of them could insure, it had demonstrated 

 nothing, its results were negative. Surely this 

 would not have been an encouraging fact for 

 any one else who conceived the germ theory of 

 disease and contemplated efforts to prove its 

 correctness. The oligarchy set up to guide re- 

 search in useful directions would hardly have 

 advised j'oung men, or others, to enter that 

 field. The fact that careful work by an able 

 investigator, even if then young, had failed to 

 find any proof of the bacterial origin of dis- 

 ease, could easily have damned the truth to a 

 generation or more of undiscovery. 



If any comfort is to be taken in the gloomy 



