PASTEUR.
M. Pasteur, now a member of the French Academy, after years of scientific training and study and teaching, began a career of public usefulness which has been a source of incalculable pecuniary profit to his country and to the world.
He began to study the nature of fermentation; and the result of this study made quite a revolution in the manufacture of wine and beer. He discovered a process which took its name from him; and now "pasteurization" is practiced on a large scale in the German breweries, to the great improvement of fermented beverages.
This attracted the attention of the French Government. At that time an unknown disease was destroying the silk-worm of France and Italy. It was so wide-spread as to threaten to destroy the silk manufacture in those countries. M. Pasteur was asked to investigate the cause. At that time he had scarcely ever seen a silk-worm; but he turned his acute, and practical intellect to the study of this little worker, and soon detected the trouble. He showed that it was due to a microscopic parasite, which was developed from a germ born with the worm; and he pointed out how to secure healthy eggs, and so rear healthy worms. He thus gave his countrymen the knowledge necessary to the saving of the French silk industry, and to a very large increase of the value of the annual productiveness of the country.
Of course, a man who had gone thus far could not stop. If he «could save the silk-worm, he might save larger animals. France was losing sheep and oxen at the rate of from fifteen to twenty millions annually. The services of M. Pasteur were again in demand. Again he discovered that the devastator was a microscopic destroyer. It was anthrax. The result of his experimenting was the discovery of an antidote, a method of prevention by inoculation with attenuated microbes. Similar studies and experiments and discoveries enabled him to furnish relief to the hog, at a time when the hog-cholera was making devastations. As he had discovered a preventive remedy for anthrax, he also found a remedy for chicken-cholera, to the saving of poultry to an incalculable extent.
Having thus contributed more to the material wealth of his country than any other living Frenchman, M. Pasteur naturally turned his discovery of the parasitic origin of disease toward human sufferers. A man of convictions and of faith, he has had the courage to ask the French minister of commerce to organize a scientific commission to go to Egypt to study the cholera there under his guidance.
M. Paul Best, who was M. Pasteur's early rival in scientific discussion, paid a generous tribute to his great ability and services, and declared that the discovery of the prevention of anthrax was the grandest and most fruitful of all French discoveries. M. Pasteur's native town, Dole, on the day of the national fete last year (1883), placed a commemorative tablet on the house in which he was born. The government's grant of a pension of $5,000 a year, to be continued to his widow and children, was made on the knowledge that if M. Pasteur had retained proprietary right in his discovery, he might have amassed a vast fortune; but he had freely given all to the public. According to an estimate made by Professor Huxley, the labors of M. Pasteur are equal in money value alone to the one thousand millions of dollars of indemnity paid by France to Germany in the late war. It is also to be remembered that M. Pasteur's labors imparted stimulus to discovery in many directions, setting many discoverers at work, who are now experimenting on the working hypothesis of the parasitic origin of all other infectious diseases.
Now here are three men, to whom the world is probably more indebted than to any other twenty men who have lived this century; indebted for health, wealth, comfort, and enjoyment; indebted in kitchen, chamber, drawing-room, counting-house; at home and abroad, by day and by night, for gratification of the bodily and aesthetic taste. They were the almoners of science. Practical men would have no tools to work with if they did not receive them from those who, in abstraction, wrought in the secluded heights of scientific investigation. It is base to be ungrateful to the studious recluses who are the devotees of science.
These three men were Christians--simple, honest, devout Christians. Faraday was a most "just and faithful knight of God," as Professor Tyndall says. Sir William Siemens, it is said, was a useful elder in the Presbyterian Church, and M. Pasteur, still living, is a reverent Roman Catholic. Surely, when we find these men walking a lofty height of science, higher than that occupied by any of their contemporaries, and when we find these men sending down more enriching gifts to the lowly sons of toil, and all the traders in the market places, and all seekers of pleasure in the world, than any other scientific men, we must be safe in the conclusion that to be an earnest Christian is not incompatible with the highest attainments in science; and we can not find fault with those who look with contempt upon the men who disdain Christianity, as if it were beneath them, when it is remembered that among the rejecters of our holy faith are no men to whom we have a right to be grateful for any discovery that has added a dollar to the world's exchequer, or a "ray to the brightness of the world's civilization."--DR. DEEMS, in the New York Independent.