But success did not come. “My studies are going rather badly,” wrote Pasteur in his turn (December 30). “I am almost afraid of failing in all my endeavours this year, and of having no important achievement to record by the end of next year. I am still hoping, though I suppose it was rather mad to undertake what I have undertaken.”
Whilst he was thus struggling, an experiment, which for others would have been a mere chemical curiosity, interested him passionately. Recalling one day how his first researches had led him to the study of ferments: “If I place,” he said, “one of the salts of racemic acid, paratartrate or racemate of ammonia, for instance, in the ordinary conditions of fermentation, the dextro-tartaric acid alone ferments, the other remains in the liquor. I may say, in passing, that this is the best means of preparing lævo-tartaric acid. Why does the dextro-tartaric acid alone become putrefied? Because the ferments of that fermentation feed more easily on the right than on the left molecules.”
“I have done yet more,” he said much later, in a last lecture to the Chemical Society of Paris; “I have kept alive some little seeds of penicillium glaucum—that mucor which is to be found everywhere—on the surface of ashes and paratartaric acid and I have seen the lævo-tartaric acid appear....”
What seemed to him startling in those two experiments was to find molecular dissymmetry appear as a modifying agent on chemical affinities in a phenomenon of the physiological order.
By an interesting coincidence it was at the very moment when his studies were bringing him towards fermentations that he was called to a country where the local industry was to be the strongest stimulant to his new researches.
CHAPTER IV
1855—1859
In September, 1854, he was made Professor and Dean of the new Faculté des Sciences at Lille. “I need not, Sir,” wrote the Minister of Public Instruction, M. Fortoul, in a letter where private feelings were mixed with official solemnity, “recall to your mind the importance which is attached to the success of this new Faculty of Science, situated in a town which is the richest centre of industrial activity in the north of France. By giving you the direction of it, I show the entire confidence which I have placed in you. I am convinced that you will fulfil the hopes which I have founded upon your zeal.”
Built at the expense of the town, the Faculté was situated in the Rue des Fleurs. In the opening speech which he pronounced on December 7, 1854, the young Dean expressed his enthusiasm for the Imperial decree of August 22, which brought two happy innovations into the Faculties of Science: (1) The pupils might, for a small annual sum, enter the laboratory and practise the principal experiments carried out before them at the classes; and (2) a new diploma was created. After two years of practical and theoretical study the young men who wished to enter an industrial career could obtain this special diploma and be chosen as foremen or overseers. Pasteur was overjoyed at being able to do useful work in that country of distilleries, and to attract large audiences to the new Faculty. “Where in your families will you find,” he said, to excite indolent minds—“where will you find a young man whose curiosity and interest will not immediately be awakened when you put into his hands a potato, when with that potato he may produce sugar, with that sugar alcohol, with that alcohol æther and vinegar? Where is he that will not be happy to tell his family in the evening that he has just been working out an electric telegraph? And, gentlemen, be convinced of this, such studies are seldom if ever forgotten. It is somewhat as if geography were to be taught by travelling; such geography is remembered because one has seen the places. In the same way your sons will not forget what the air we breathe contains when they have once analysed it, when in their hands and under their eyes the admirable properties of its elements have been resolved.”
After stating his wish to be directly useful to these sons of manufacturers and to put his laboratory at their disposal, he eloquently upheld the rights of theory in teaching—
“Without theory, practice is but routine born of habit. Theory alone can bring forth and develop the spirit of invention. It is to you specially that it will belong not to share the opinion of those narrow minds who disdain everything in science which has not an immediate application. You know Franklin’s charming saying? He was witnessing the first demonstration of a purely scientific discovery, and people round him said: ‘But what is the use of it?’ Franklin answered them: ‘What is the use of a new-born child?’ Yes, gentlemen, what is the use of a new-born child? And yet, perhaps, at that tender age, germs already existed in you of the talents which distinguish you! In your baby boys, fragile beings as they are, there are incipient magistrates, scientists, heroes as valiant as those who are now covering themselves with glory under the walls of Sebastopol. And thus, gentlemen, a theoretical discovery has but the merit of its existence: it awakens hope, and that is all. But let it be cultivated, let it grow, and you will see what it will become.