Tli 



346 



THE BEGINNINGS OF IIFE. 



the investigators above mentioned did not permit them 

 to come to a similar conclusion, still M. Pasteur's 

 reputation as an exact and brilliant experimenter has 

 been all-powerful, and the majority of readers have, 

 apparently, been only too willing to believe implicitly 

 in conclusions which they may have found to be com- 

 patible with their own theories or prejudices. They have 

 not hesitated to explain away results of a contradictory 

 nature, on the ground that those who made the ex- 

 periments had not taken sufficient care to perform 

 them in a thoroughly stringent manner, or else on the 

 supposition that the organisms which they had found 

 in their experimental fluids were not living. <^ Was it 

 certain that the flasks had been hermetically sealed? 

 Had the air been sufficiently calcined? Were the 

 organisms which had been seen really alive?" Such 

 were the questions and doubts that were continually 

 addressed to persons who chanced to get results at all 

 different from those of M. Pasteur. His experiments 

 and reasonings have again and again been quoted as 

 alike unanswerable. Nevertheless, I hope to be able to 

 show that his conclusions are rendered untenable in the 

 face of further experiments, and that M. Pasteur was 

 not even entitled to draw the conclusions which he did 

 draw from his own experiments. Assumptions have 

 occasionally been inserted, in his chain of reasoning, 

 as though they were established facts^ and his whole 

 argument has, therefore, been rendered weak and 

 vulnerable. 



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