110 



Anniversary Meeting, 



[Nov. 30, 



duced the word agnostic to describe his own feeling with reference to 

 the origin and continuance of life, he confessed himself to be in the 

 presence of mysteries on which science had not been strong enough 

 to enlighten us ; and he chose the word wisely and well. It is a 

 word, which, even though negative in character, may be helpful to 

 all philosophers and theologians. If religion means strenuousness in 

 doing right and trying to do right, who has earned the title of a 

 religions man better than Huxley ? 



Another name literally of world-wide fame, Louis Pasteur, stands 

 next to the end of our list of losses. Before he entered on his grand 

 biological work, Pasteur made a discovery of first-rate importance in 

 physics and chemistry — the formation of crystals, visibly right-handed 

 and left-handed, from a solution of racemate of soda and ammonia ; and 

 the extraction of ordinary tartaric acid and of a kind of tartaric acid not 

 previously known, from solutions obtained by picking out the crystals 

 separately and redissolving : the new kind of tartaric acid having the 

 property of producing the opposite rotatory effect on the plane of 

 polarisation of light to that produced by ordinary tartaric acid. 

 From 1848 to 1857 he was chiefly occupied with researches related 

 to the subject of that great discovery, as may be seen from the titles 

 of the first twenty-two of his papers in the Royal Society Cata- 

 logue. His work of those nine years led up from Biot's fundamental 

 discovery of the dioptric helicoidal property of liquids and vapours, 

 to the enrichment of chemistry by the annexation of a new province 

 called stereochemistry, splendidly and fruitfully developed twenty 

 years later by Le Bel and Van't Hoff. Near the end of 1857 his twenty- 

 third paper appeared, three pages, in the ' Comptes Rendus,' " Sur la 

 Fermentation appelee lactique." It shows that he had then entered 

 on the line of research to which he devoted the rest of his life, and by 

 which he conferred untold benefits on humanity and the lower animals. 

 As I had occasion to remark in my presidential address of last year, 

 Helmholtz had in his earliest work proved almost to a certainty 

 " that the actual presence of a living creature, vibrio, as he called 

 it, bacterium as we more commonly call it now, is necessary for 

 either fermentation or putrefaction." Pasteur gave complete demon- 

 stration of that conclusion, and early expanded it to vast and previously 

 undreamt of extensions of its application. The first great practical 

 application of his views w T as made by Lister, about 1863-65, then my 

 colleague in the University of Glasgow, now recommended by your 

 Council as my s accessor to the Presidency of the Hoyal Society. 

 Prom Pasteur's discoveries he was led to work out the principles of 

 his antiseptic surgery, the practice of which he commenced in the 

 Glasgow Royal Infirmary in the summer of 1865. 



Having been led to trace microbes as the origin not only of fermen- 

 tation and putrefaction, but of a vast array of destructive blights 



