November 8, 1895.] 



SCIENCE. 



605 



try in which unexplained difficulties were 

 constantly occurring. He soon found the 

 cause of the various failures of the vintner 

 by which were produced many of the so- 

 called ' diseases of wine.' These diseases 

 he found were all due to the presence of 

 improper micro-organisms during the fer- 

 mentation instead of the pure fermenting 

 yeasts, and he quickly devised a remedy for 

 them in a process that has subsequently 

 been known by his name as the process of 

 pasteurization. This method of preventing 

 the evils involving the heating of wine, 

 was received with great opposition on the 

 ground that the heating injured the flavor. 

 After a great deal of more or less violent 

 disputing on the matter Pasteur arranged 

 for a public test of the question by getting 

 together a large number of experts and con- 

 vincing them against their will, by ingeni- 

 ously devised deceits, that they were unable 

 to distinguish between wines that had been 

 pasteurized by his process and wines that 

 had not been subject to heat. Having pre- 

 viously shown that the method of pasteuri- 

 zation was almost a sure remedy against 

 the various diseases, this first public dem- 

 onstration was thus a brilUant success and 

 at once obtained for his method the accept- 

 ance of the vintner. 



Meantime he had been giving his atten- 

 tion to the vexed problem of the last two 

 or three centuries, namely, the question of 

 spotaneous generation. Believing, as he did , 

 that all fermentation was caused by mi- 

 ci'o-organisms, it was a foregone conclusion 

 that he would be an opponent to the view 

 of spontaneous generation. The studies 

 upon fermentation which he had been car- 

 rying on, and his accurate methods, trained 

 him especially well for this subject of spon- 

 taneous generation, and the experiments 

 which he instituted brought this question 

 into the condition of demonstration. The 

 experiments of early scientists were repeated 

 by him with greater care; many new ex- 



periments of his own were devised; the mi- 

 croscope was brought into requisition in 

 new ways. A brilliant conclusion was 

 reached, that by the exercise of sufficient 

 care all traces of life could be avoided and 

 no spontaneous generation ever occurred. 

 It is true that the conclusions of Pasteur 

 were not at once everywhere accepted. In 

 England, particularly, objectors arose who 

 advocated a belief in spontaneous genera- 

 tion, and these objections were not silenced 

 until the English physicist Tyndall took 

 up the experiments that Pasteur had been 

 making and even more satisfactorily reached 

 the same conclusion. But Tyndall's results 

 were only those that Pasteur had reached 

 before, and we recognize to-day that the 

 only basis of the objections that were made 

 to Pasteur's conclusions was the inaccuracy 

 and lack of care with which his opponents 

 performed their experiments. With brill- 

 iant rhetoric and loose experimenting, spon- 

 taneous generation was still advocated, but 

 the disproof was given by Pasteur in spite 

 of the fact that opposition still arose after 

 the disproof had been reached. 



But now Pasteur's attention was to be 

 turned again and in a direction that again 

 changed his whole life and has revolution- 

 ized modern medicine. One of the great 

 industries of France is that of the silk- 

 worm raising. About 1850 there appeared 

 upon the silk-worm farms a disease of the 

 silk worm known as pebrine. This dis- 

 ease spread rapidly from farm to farm, 

 greatly reduced the productions of the silk- 

 worm farms and actually threatened the 

 entire destruction of the silk-worm indus- 

 try. From 57,000,000 pounds per year in 

 13 years this industry had fallen to 8,000,- 

 000 pounds, all because of the great devas- 

 tation produced by this disease. Many had 

 been the attempts made to cure it and 

 many the attempts made to discover its 

 cause. Men with a reputation greater than 

 that possessed by Pasteur, at the time, had 



