IMPORTANCE OF THE WORK OF PASTEUR
At length the chemical processes of life upon the earth were unified. Living things were seen to make up a single community, the great laboratory through which alone matter flows in its everlasting cycle.
The results of Pasteur’s discoveries and of the methods of investigation which he introduced are probably already greater than the results of Napoleon’s life. The simple great man, who almost alone among the scientists of the nineteenth century equals the genius and virtue of Faraday, shares with the latter the first position among those who have revolutionized our twentieth-century world.
Pasteur’s discoveries explained at once such observations as those of Oliver Wendell Holmes.〖See Holmes, “The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever,” in H.C., xxxviii, 257.〗 They gave a clue to such mysterious processes as vaccination.〖See Jenner’s original publications on vaccination against smallpox in H. C., xxxviii, 145ff.〗 And one after another each great pest has yielded up its secret cause—a specific micro-organism—to the disciples of Pasteur.