420 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



utility of some of his discoveries he was wont to reply in the words of 

 Franklin, "What is the use of a baby?" And it is on record too that in 

 dispute over the priority of certain scientific discoveries he stood 

 resolutely on his rights on more than one occasion. 



And Davy, baronet and pet of society, aristocrat in the common ac- 

 ceptance of the term — which was he? "A philosopher" he was in the 

 old terminology, and the "philosophers" were mostly aristocrats in 

 science. His fame rests chiefly on his discoveries in electro-chemistry, 

 but we can not forget the ten years of lecturing in the cause of agricul- 

 ture and his own experiments for its promotion. And there is the de- 

 liberate and successful attempt to produce a safety lamp for miners, 

 followed by the presentation to him of a set of plate worth two thousand 

 pounds by the coal owners of the Tyne and Wear in testimony of their 

 appreciation of the benefit thus conferred. And we know that his last 

 great scientific endeavor was an effort based on exact deduction from 

 the laws of electro-chemistry to protect the copper shearing of vessels 

 from the corrosive action of sea water. Vain and selfish he may have 

 been, but he must have had the interest of the people at heart, and so 

 we can place that to his credit against his oft cited jealousy and ill 

 treatment of his rising, more brilliant pupil, Faraday. 



Probably the greatest scientific democrat in history is Louis Pasteur. 

 No more patent testimony of public affection for a scientific man has 

 ever been given than that expressed in the recent French plebiscite on 

 the greatest man of the nation, which went easily to Pasteur with Sadi- 

 Carnot and the great Corsican running second and third. And yet, as 

 we have defined the term, Pasteur began his researches as one of the 

 aristocrats; it was his brilliant success in a field of pure science which 

 laid the foundation and directed the way for his later, more famous, 

 investigations on the etiology of disease. It was in the course of his 

 highly technical work on the optical rotation of the salts of tartaric acid 

 that he discovered the fact that of its isomers one form is destroyed by 

 fermentation, and the other not. These isomers, like the sugars de- 

 scribed above, differ from each other simply in the arrangement of the 

 same atoms in space. He thus anticipated by many years Fischer's 

 classic work on enzymes. But in their application of the facts thus 

 secured is strikingly emphasized the wide divergence in the point of 

 view of the two men. Fischer's work on ferments constantly led back 

 to the theory of sugar structure. With Pasteur's successful solution of 

 his problem he turned the page and with new interest in fermenting 

 bacteria entered upon that lifelong endeavor to thwart the action of 

 pernicious microorganisms that has made him one of the greatest bene- 

 factors of mankind. 



How he passed first to the relief of stricken industry, adopting 

 means, based on his discoveries in bacteriology, for the cure of 



