■74 
Pasteur and his Work, 
of his helplessness, he succeeded in reaching the Imperial Villa, 
where his skill was rewarded with marvellous success ; lor in a 
short time the sale of the cocoons realised a net profit of twenty- 
six millions of francs. On this result being made known, the 
Emperor nominated him a Senator of France in July 1870 ; but 
before the nomination was gazetted in the official journal, the 
war with Germany interfered, and Pasteur returned to France to 
share in the misfortunes and mortifications of his country during 
'that eventful period. 
When the war was over, he commenced his studies on the 
.preservation of beer, to which allusion has been already made. 
The results of these studies were so beneficial that they were 
universally recognised ; and as an instance of the estimation 
in which they were held beyond France, it may be mentioned 
that a celebrated scientist of Copenhagen, Jacobsen, had a bust of 
Pasteur placed in the sallc (Vhonneur of his celebrated laboratory. 
•On the conclusion of the report which he made on these studies, 
Pasteur alluded to the principles uj)on which, for twenty years, 
he had pursued his labours — principles the application and ad- 
vantages of >vhich seemed to him without limit ; and, firm in 
his conviction, he prophetically wrote, " the etiology (cause) of 
contagious diseases is on the eve of having unexpected light 
■thrown upon it." 
Two hundred years before Pasteur had achieved his well- 
deserved fame, England could boast of three men whose names 
yet stand pre-eminent in natural science — Newton, Hooke, and 
Boyle. Boyle was born in the year in which the great Bacon 
died, and he was the earliest, though perhaps not the most dis- 
tinguished, of those who practically applied the precepts set 
forth in the ' Novum Organum ' of the Imperial Verulam, and 
is therefore the patriarch of experimental science, at least in 
England — a science of which Pasteur is now one of the chief 
exponents. Boyle's genius as a physicist led him into many 
notable discoveries and surmises, and one of the latter is most 
memorable in relation to the subject which now occupies our 
attention, forecasting, as it did, the revelations effected by 
Pasteur in the direction indicated by him. " He that thoroughly 
understands the nature of ferments and fermentation," wrote 
Boyle, who had devoted much time, amid his multifarious 
studies, to this question of fermentation, "shall probably be 
much better able than he that ignores them, to give a fair account, 
of divers phenomena of certain diseases (as well fever as others), 
which will perhaps be never properly understood without an 
insight into the doctrine of fermentation." 
The mention of contagious diseases recalls sad memories of 
agricultural misfortunes in the United Kingdom, for nearly half 
