Now that the dust of combat has fallen, it is curious to
pass in review the events of the strife, of which, further-
more, Pasteur bore the brunt. We shall discover a
Pasteur whom we have not yet known; a vigorous and
sometimes a hot-headed polemic, a cautious polemic
also, who profits by what his adversaries teach him.

I shall pass rapidly over the long discussion, opened
with Pouchet in the first place, then with Pouchet, Joly
and Musset. This discussion created a great deal of
stir in its time, but science did not derive from it any
new truth. In order to obtain a spark, it is necessary
to have the friction of iron against flint; here there was
only that of iron on punk. Pouchet was a conscientious,
erudite naturalist, animated by a desire to arrive at the
truth, but impelled by the nature of his mind outside
the only paths where it is to be found. He portrays
himself exactly in the second line of the preface of his
Traité de l'hétérogénie, published in 1859. "When by
meditation," he says, "it became evident to me that
spontaneous generation was another one of the means
which nature employs for the reproduction of her crea-
tures, I applied myself to discover by what processes one
could demonstrate the phenomena." I picture to my-
self how Pasteur, as well as Tyndall later, must have
read these lines with stupefaction. Thus, behold a
scientific man who calls on experiment to prove a truth
which he considers in advance as certain--what shall I
say--as evident, although he has reached it only by
meditation! How much in accord here are this extra-
ordinary mind and extraordinary language! Tyndall
has remarked that it would have required a very powerful
bridle to hold in check a mind so strongly biased. Now,
not only was Pouchet incapable of profiting by the results
of a well-performed experiment, but he was a very medi-
ocre experimenter whenever he left the domain of natural

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