Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/851

Rh of their cause, is resolving that marvelous problem of transforming the agent that causes death into an agent preservative against its assaults!. . . Justice," he continued, "is often tardy for inventors; its pace is frequently so halting that their life is not long enough for them to have time to see it come. M. Pasteur, whom I name at last, has had the privilege of seeing it hasten its pace for him. He is also one of those whose virtue does not rest when it has made their opinion good. Master of what he knew to be the truth, he has desired and has known how to give it force by the evident clearness of his experimental demonstrations, and to force the majority of those who were at first refractory to confess it with him." A writer in the "Westminster Review" gives eloquent utterance to a similar sentiment, when he speaks of M. Pasteur as one "whose researches have yielded so much material profit that one thinks of him as of the orange-tree standing in all the glory of blossom and fruit at the same time."

M. Pasteur was received with enthusiastic acclamations by the International Medical Congress when he arose to make the address which we publish; and the address was distributed by the Government through all parts of the United Kingdom. The "Graphic," publishing his portrait, published also a remark of Sir James Paget, that, by his discoveries relative to carbuncular diseases he had done for cattle what Jenner had done for the human race. And Professor Huxley has said that he considered the discoveries so important that they were worth all the five milliards of francs which France paid to Germany after the war of 1870–'71.

In 1868 M. Pasteur was awarded a prize of 10,000 florins by the Agricultural Minister of Austria for the discovery of the best means of contending with the silk-worm disease. A decree was signed by Napoleon III and M. Ollivier in July, 1870, but never promulgated, making him Senator. The French Government granted him, in 1874, a pension of 12,000 francs, "in consideration of his services to science and industry," and in the next year increased the pension by the addition of 6,000 francs. The Société d'Encouragement, in 1873, awarded him a prize of 12,000 francs for his studies relative to the silk-worm, wine, vinegar, and beer, collectively.

M. Pasteur was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1862, to take the place of Senarmont in the section of Mineralogy. In 1869 he was elected one of the fifty foreign members of the Royal Society of London. His principal works, besides his communications to the "Recueils des Savants Étrangers" and the "Annales de Chimie et de Physique," are: "Nouvel Exemple de Fermentation déterminé par des Animalcules infusoires pouvant vivre sans Oxygène libre" (Paris, 1863); "Études sur le Vin, ses Maladies, etc." (1866); "Étude sur le Vinaigre, etc." (1868); "Études sur les Vers à Soie" (2 vols., 1870); "Quelques Réflexions sur la Science en France" (1871); and "Études sur la Bière."