On his return to Strasburg Pasteur went to live in a house in the Rue des Couples, which suited him as being near the Académie and his laboratory; it also had a garden where his children could play. He was full of projects, and what he called the “spirit of invention” daily suggested some new undertaking. The neighbourhood of Germany, at that time a veritable hive of busy bees, was a fertile stimulant to the French Faculty at Strasburg.
But material means were lacking. When Pasteur received the prize of 1,500 francs given him by the Pharmaceutical Society, he gave up half of it to buying instruments which the Strasburg laboratory was too poor to afford. The resources then placed by the State at his disposal by way of contribution to the expenses of a chemistry class only consisted of 1,200 francs under the heading “class expenses.” Pasteur had to pay the wages of his laboratory attendant out of it. Now that he was better provided, thanks to his prize, he renewed his studies on crystals.
Taking up an octahedral crystal, he broke off a piece of it, then replaced it in its mother-liquor. Whilst the crystal was growing larger in every direction by a deposit of crystalline particles, a very active formation was taking place on the mutilated part; after a few hours the crystal had again assumed its original shape. The healing up of wounds, said Pasteur, might be compared to that physical phenomenon. Claude Bernard, much struck later on by these experiments of Pasteur’s and recalling them with much praise, said in his turn—
“These reconstituting phenomena of crystalline redintegration afford a complete comparison with those presented by living beings in the case of a wound more or less deep. In the crystal as in the animal, the damaged part heals, gradually taking back its original shape, and in both cases the reformation of tissue is far more active in that particular part than under ordinary evolutive conditions.”
Thus those two great minds saw affinities hidden under facts apparently far apart. Other similarities yet more unexpected carried Pasteur away towards the highest region of speculation. He spoke with enthusiasm of molecular dissymmetry; he saw it everywhere in the universe. These studies in dissymmetry gave birth twenty years later to a new science arising immediately out of his work, viz. stereo-chemistry, or the chemistry of space. He also saw in molecular dissymmetry the influence of a great cosmic cause—
“The universe,” he said one day, “is a dissymmetrical whole. I am inclined to think that life, as manifested to us, must be a function of the dissymmetry of the universe and of the consequences it produces. The universe is dissymmetrical; for, if the whole of the bodies which compose the solar system were placed before a glass moving with their individual movements, the image in the glass could not be superposed to the reality. Even the movement of solar life is dissymmetrical. A luminous ray never strikes in a straight line the leaf where vegetable life creates organic matter. Terrestrial magnetism, the opposition which exists between the north and south poles in a magnet, that offered us by the two electricities positive and negative, are but resultants from dissymmetrical actions and movements.”
“Life,” he said again, “is dominated by dissymmetrical actions. I can even foresee that all living species are primordially, in their structure, in their external forms, functions of cosmic dissymmetry.”
And there appeared to him to be a barrier between mineral or artificial products and products formed under the influence of life. But he did not look upon it as an impassable one, and he was careful to say, “It is a distinction of fact and not of absolute principle.” As nature elaborates immediate principles of life by means of dissymmetrical forces, he wished that the chemist should imitate nature, and that, breaking with methods founded upon the exclusive use of symmetrical forces, he should bring dissymmetrical forces to bear upon the production of chemical phenomena. He himself, after using powerful magnets to attempt to introduce a manifestation of dissymmetry into the form of crystals, had had a strong clockwork movement constructed, the object of which was to keep a plant in continual rotatory motion first in one direction then in another. He also proposed to try to keep a plant alive, from its germination under the influence of solar rays reversed by means of a mirror directed by a heliostat.
But Biot wrote to him: “I should like to be able to turn you from the attempts you wish to make on the influence of magnetism on vegetation. M. de Senarmont agrees with me. To begin with, you will spend a great deal on the purchase of instruments with the use of which you are not familiar, and of which the success is very doubtful. They will take you away from the fruitful course of experimental researches which you have followed hitherto, where there is yet so much for you to do, and will lead you from the certain to the uncertain.”
“Louis is rather too preoccupied with his experiments,” wrote Mme. Pasteur to her father-in-law; “you know that those he is undertaking this year will give us, if they succeed, a Newton or a Galileo.”