Annual Report of the Council. 135 



Louis Pasteur must be regarded as one of the 

 grands initiateurs — to use Naville's phrase — of the nine- 

 teenth century. Although he was not the discoverer of 

 microbia— that honour belongs to Leeuwenhoek — and 

 though it is to Cagniard La Tour and Schwann that we 

 owe the definite establishment of the so-called vegetable 

 nature of yeast, it is to Pasteur that we chiefly owe the 

 vast extension of the science of micro-biology and the 

 discovery of phenomena in the life-history of these 

 infinitely minute organisms, including their relation to 

 the etiology of disease and to the chemistry of all other 

 forms of life, which justify us in regarding them, in the 

 language of Dumas, as a third order of living beings not 

 exactly either vegetable or animal ; creatures who can live 

 either with or without free oxygen. Pasteur's researches 

 have opened up some of the most profound problems in 

 speculative science, and thrown a light upon them which 

 have given him a title to be regarded as the revealer of 

 a new world of research. The practical results of his 

 discoveries, in medicine, surgery, and industry, have 

 already been enormous ; but even these are insignificant 

 in comparison with the possibilities of future discoveries 

 in regard to the mystery of life, heredity, and the relations 

 between the organic and the inorganic. The son of a 

 soldier who fought in Napoleon's army at Waterloo, and 

 who subsequently became a tanner, he was born in the little 

 town of Dole, in the French Jura, on December 27th, 1822. 

 To his father, who used to take the boy on his knee and 

 tell him stories of the battles in which he had fought, and 

 who also impressed him with his own strong religious faith, 

 Louis Pasteur owed the two most marked features in his 

 character — a profoundly reverential spirit, and a passionate 

 sense of patriotism ; and these two sentiments had so 

 marked a guiding influence on his work that it may 

 truthfully be said that to them his discoveries were due. 



