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.