aJ8 WORKMEN AND HEROES v DR. LOUIS PASTEUR* By Dr. Cyrus Edson (1822-1895) L c ouis Pasteur, the Columous of " the world of the infinitely little " to quote the phrase of Pro- fessor Dumas was born in the town of Dole, France, on Decem- ber 27, 1822. His father was an old soldier, decorated on the field of battle, who, after leaving the army, earned his bread as a tanner. In 1825 M. Pasteur moved from Dole to the town of Arbois, on the borders of the Cuisance, where his son began his education in the communal college. The boy was exceedingly fond of fishing and of sketching, and it was not until he reached the age of fourteen that he began study in earnest. There be- ing no professor of philosophy at Arbois, Louis Pasteur moved to Besancon, where he received the degree of bachelier is Icttres and was at once appointed as one of the tutors. Here he studied the course in mathematics necessary for admission into the Ecole Normale, in Paris, which he entered in October, 1843. Already his passion for chemistry had shown itself, and he took the lectures in that science delivered by M. Dumas at the Sorbonne, and by M. Balard at the Ecole Normale. It was but a short time before he be- came a marked man in his class, especially for his intense devotion to experi- ment. Thanks to M. Delafosse, one of the lecturers of the Ecole Normale, his attention was turned to crystallography, and a note from the German chemist, Mitscherlich, communicated to the Academy of Sciences, set him on fire with curiosity. Mitscherlich declared : " The paratartrate and the tartrate of soda and ammonia have the same chemical composition, the same crystalline form, the same angles, the same specific weight, the same double refraction, and the same inclination of the optic axes. Dissolved in water, their refraction is the same. But while the dissolved tartrate causes the plane of polarized light to rotate, the paratartrate exacts no such action."
- Copyright, 1894. by Selmar Hess.
