56 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



and tubes, prepared and sealed by Pasteur over fifty years ago, containing 

 organic fluids which have undergone no fermentation clianges whatsoever. 

 To quote his own words from his Sorbonne lecture of 1864 : 



" I have excluded from my flasks of organic fluids, and am still 

 excluding from them, the one thing which is past man's making ; I 

 have excluded from them the germs which float in tlie air; I have 

 excluded from them life." 



Subsequent discussions on spontaneous generation have been little more 

 than sparks among the ashes of a great controversy. 



V. 



In his attempts to extend the empire of science into the foreign and 

 hostile land of medicine, Pasteur found a strong-hearted ally in Surgeon 

 Lister of Glasgow, whose sense of the impotence of many remedial measures 

 then practised led him to break away from the contemporary doctrine that 

 wound-putrefaction was due to simple exposure to the air, and to seek to 

 sterilize the wounds by methods derived from Pasteur's experiments. 



Lister's means were crude, and his antiseptics were faulty — often so 

 strong that they destroyed the good and bad tissues alike, or so weak that 

 their action was ineffective. However, as Mr. Stephen Paget has expressed 

 it : " His methods were fallible, but he had got hold of principles that were 

 infallible." Thus was the reign of antiseptic surgery begun. 



Pasteur's studies in human pathology were made easier for him owing to 

 the recognition of his great discoveries in connexion with the diseases of silk- 

 worms, which had threatened ruin on the industries in the south of France, 

 and had resulted in a loss of one hundred million francs in the single year 

 1865. " 



At the request of his old teacher and friend, Dumas, Pasteur went to 

 Alais, and settled in the centre of the ruined districts. His work was 

 completely successful from the scientitic and from the industrial aspects. 

 He isolated the organisms of two distinct diseases, hitherto considered as 

 one, and invented a method of detecting and separating diseased stock, which 

 has been adopted in all countries where the silk-worm is cultivated. This 

 triumph was won at the expense of over three years' unremittent work and a 

 severe penalty. 



Id 1868 Pasteur was struck down with semi-paralysis, and while still 

 convalescent, the I'ranco-Prussian War of 1870 brought him sorrow keener 

 than death itself. Sliall we not cry, " Happy are the dead ? " he wrote to 

 one of his friends ; and to another, " How fortunate you are to be young and 



