Out of these researches arose a famous battle which kept Pasteur hard at
work for four or five years--the struggle over spontaneous generation.
It was an old warfare, but the microscope had revealed a new world, and
the experiments on fermentation had lent great weight to the omne vivum
ex ovo doctrine. The famous Italians, Redi and Spallanzani, had led the
way in their experiments, and the latter had reached the conclusion
that there is no vegetable and no animal that has not its own germ. But
heterogenesis became the burning question, and Pouchet in France, and
Bastian in England, led the opposition to Pasteur. The many famous
experiments carried conviction to the minds of scientific men, and
destroyed forever the old belief in spontaneous generation. All along,
the analogy between disease and fermentation must have been in Pasteur's
mind; and then came the suggestion, "What would be most desirable is to
push those studies far enough to prepare the road for a serious
research into the origin of various diseases." If the changes in lactic,
alcoholic and butyric fermentations are due to minute living organisms,
why should not the same tiny creatures make the changes which occur
in the body in the putrid and suppurative diseases? With an accurate
training as a chemist, having been diverted in his studies upon
fermentation into the realm of biology, and nourishing a strong
conviction of the identity between putrefactive changes of the body
and fermentation, Pasteur was well prepared to undertake investigations
which had hitherto been confined to physicians alone.
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