FILLING THE SYRINGES.
Thus as one goes from room to room he can follow the whole method of successive cultures, that method which is “the key-stone of the arch, and without which there could be no vigorous demonstration of the Pasteur method.”
On every hand one sees the interesting “ways of doing things” which characterize the Institute. Here, the cleaning of jars, syringes and tubes is going on; not a simple washing and drying. In the Pasteur household articles are sterilized as well as cleaned—that is, burned in the flames of a spirit lamp, or in an oven. There, a man is blowing bulbs, droll balloon pipettes, all the multitude of glass contrivances the laboratories demand. Here, under a microscope, an investigator has the diphtheria pest, an inoffensive speck; there, another has in his field a whole colony of lively little straight and bent sticks; it is a company of Doctor Koch’s cholera microbes.
Wherever one goes in the building there is a busy intentness, an absorption, an absolute blindness to everything but the work in hand, be it the contents of a culture tube, or the film on a microscope slide. One can easily believe of these workers the story told 340 of M. Pasteur himself, that he had to be hunted up on his wedding morning and pulled away from his microscope, in order to be got into his dress-coat and gloves in time for the ceremony.
Evidently, too, they have not forgotten the words their master spoke on the day of the inauguration of the Institute:
“All the enthusiasm you have had since the beginning, my dear co-laborers, I beg of you to keep; but give it, as an inseparable companion, a severe control. Announce nothing that you cannot prove in a simple, decisive fashion.
“Cultivate the critical spirit. Left to itself it neither awakens ideas nor stimulates to great deeds, but without it all is lost.”
As one goes from room to room, and talks with one and another of the busy, courteous savants, he realizes finally that it is here that Pasteur the scientist is to be found. The labors that made the great savant famous are all summed up here. Here his methods are at work, here is his spirit alive in the men who have best comprehended him, and whom he has been able most deeply to inspire. It is a great thing to achieve. It is a greater thing to inspire others to achieve. Louis Pasteur has done both.