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consequences. What signified these healthy individuals
in a progeny strongly infected from both parents, and
evidently attacked by a hereditary taint? "Can it be
that among the eggs of a laying, derived from a male
and a female badly diseased, there are some healthy
eggs? Or will some eggs slightly diseased give worms
which recover health during the culture? I do not
know which of these two interpretations is the better,
and both are perhaps correct." 1 The phrase is curious,
and bears witness that Pasteur began to doubt in 1866
concerning the interpretation of the phenomena which
he had accepted hitherto. The idea of a constitutional
disease of which corpuscles were only the external and
later sign did not harmonize very well with this presence
of a few healthy eggs in the midst of their diseased
neighbors. Excluding parasitism, one does not com-
prehend this immunity of some individuals in the midst
of others entirely alike in that they are the descend-
ants of the same organism. But this idea of
parasitism, which was blended with the idea of the cor-
puscle as a cause of the disease, was repulsed by Pasteur
at this moment with a kind of obstinacy, and with such
a singular mixture of true and false arguments that it is
useful to pass them in review. To do so will be to study
him in a vital point of his career, that in which he aban-
dons tradition and launches out into new ways.He enumerated these arguments himself the following
year, for his scruples were of long duration. "Is the
disease parasitical?" 2 he asks himself in the note pre-
sented to the Imperial Commission of Silk Culture, in its
sitting of January 12, 1867, and he rejects this opinion
for the following reasons:
1. "Because the disease is certainly constitutional in
____________________
1 Études our maladie des vers à soie, t. II, p. 165.
2 Études sur la maladie des vers à soie, t. II, p. 181.

-163-

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Publication Information: Book Title: Pasteur: The History of a Mind. Contributors: Ėmile Duclaux - author, Erwin F. Smith - transltr, Florence Hedges - transltr. Publisher: W.B. Saunders Company. Place of Publication: Philadelphia. Publication Year: 1920. Page Number: 163.
    
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