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VI. 



PASTEUK CENTENARY CELEBRATION, 

 26th Februaky, 1923. 



1.— LOUIS PASTEUR, 



By WILLIAM ROBERT FEARON, Sc.D., F.T.C.D. 



I. 



This afternoon we havft assembled for the purpose of recalling to mind the 

 achievements and example of a man whose life-work has rendered him famous 

 among the men of his generation and ours ; and whose genius is intimately 

 associated with the present progress of knowledge in science, medicine, and 

 the industries. 



Although the name of Louis Pasteur belongs to so many departments of 

 learning, his life was in no wise divided or dispersed. Begun in simplicity and 

 obscurity — " the small hidden spring of a large river " — it was continued and 

 directed with an exactness of purpose that makes it read like an epic rather 

 than a record of mortal accomplishment. 



He was born at Dole on December 27th, 1822. His father, Jean Joseph 

 Pasteur, who had served under Napoleon as a Sergeant-Major, and had been 

 awarded the Legion of Honour, soon afterwards moved to Arbois and settled 

 as a tanner. In the midst of these quiet surroundings the youth of Pasteur 

 was spent. 



He entered the Ecole Normale of Paris in 1843 ; where he came under 

 the influence of great and inspiring teachers, notably the chemist Dumas, and 

 here, while yet in the spring-time of his life he made his first discovery — the 

 exact nature of the mysterious racemic acid, which had been found in the wine 

 vats in Alsace twenty-five years previously, and which had baffled the best 

 intellects of French chemistry. 



From a careful examination of the crystalline forms of this acid and its 

 salts, Pasteur found that it was really a mixture of two substances ; one, the 

 familiar tartaric acid of antiquity, the other a new form of tartaric acid 

 hitherto unsuspected. 



This discovery, of great interest in the theory of chemistry, was the first 

 demonstration of the two great qualities which characterized Pasteur's later 

 investigations: namely, exact observation and great experimental skill in 

 manipulation. 



