sentation of the character of Barabas in Marlowe's 'Jew of Malta,' and of that of Aaron in 'Titus Andronicus,' in both of which gigantic evil seems to be imitated merely for the sake of adding force to the dramatic representation. But he would not have disapproved of the part of Iago in 'Othello'; nor do we think that he would have acquiesced in Mr Butcher's conclusion that 'Satan, though he were never "less than archangel ruined," is not, under Aristotelian rules, a fitting character for an epic poem.'

It appears to us, on the contrary, that Aristotle would have recognised that, in Paradise Lost,' the poet was imitating an organic idea of nature, and that to the action of his poem the person of Satan was absolutely necessary. He would therefore have given it the praise which it undoubtedly deserves. The questions which he would have asked himself in judging any poetic imitation would have been, on the aesthetic side, whether the poem possessed a proper beginning, middle, and end; and on the moral side, whether this ideal imitation of Nature was calculated to produce sane and healthy pleasure of a kind which would be approved by a good citizen. There is no absolute æsthetic or literary standard by which a critic can determine whether a poem is good or bad in itself, nor can we in this matter go beyond the critical method of Aristotle. Let the modern critic, in appreciating a work of imagination, ask himself how far it answers to the idea of nature, viewed in the light of his own conscience and of the historic conscience of the society to which he belongs, and then see how far it is expressed in conformity with the laws proper to art. If he performs his functions in this spirit of reasoning independence, without fear or favour, he will be doing his part in the conflict with that literary anarchy which M. Recolin has described.

Art. IV.-PASTEUR AND HIS DISCOVERIES.

1. La vie de Pasteur. Par René Vallery-Radot. Paris: Hachette, 1900.

2. Pasteur. By Percy Frankland and Mrs. Percy Frankland. (Century Science Series.) London: Cassell, 1898. 3. The Soluble Ferments and Fermentation. By J. Reynolds Green. (Cambridge Natural Science Manuals.) Cambridge University Press, 1899.

4. Micro-organisms and Fermentation. By Alfred Jörgensen. Translated by A. K. Miller and A. E. Lennholm. Third Edition. London: Macmillan, 1900.

As one walks down the Rue des Tanneurs, in the small provincial town of Dôle, where the main line from Paris to Pontarlier sends off a branch north-east towards Besançon, a small tablet set in the façade of a humble dwelling catches the eye. It bears the following inscription in gilt letters: Ici est né Louis Pasteur le 27 décembre 1822.'

Pasteur came of the people. In the heraldic meaning of the term, he was emphatically not born.' His forbears were shepherds, peasants, tillers of the earth, millers, and latterly, tanners. But he came from amongst the best peasantry in Europe, that peasantry which is still the backbone of the great French nation. The admirable care with which records are preserved in France has enabled Pasteur's son-in-law and latest biographer to trace the family name in the parish archives back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, at which period numerous Pasteurs were living in the villages round about the Priory of Mouthe, 'en pleine Franche-Comté.'

The first to emerge clearly from the confused cluster of possible ancestors is a certain Denis Pasteur, who became miller to the Comte d'Udressier, after whom he doubtless named his son Claude, born in 1683. Claude in his turn became a miller, and died in the year 1746. Of his eight children, the youngest, Claude-Etienne, was the greatgrandfather of Louis Pasteur. The inhabitants of FrancheComté were, in large part, serfs-gens de mainmorte,' as they termed them then. Claude-Étienne, being a serf, at the age of thirty wished to enfranchise himself; and this he did in 1763, by the special grace of 'Messire

Philippe - Marie - Francois, Comte d'Udressier, Seigneur d'Ecleux, Cramans, Lemuy, et autres lieux,' and on the payment of four louis-d'or. He subsequently married and had children. His third son, Jean-Henri, who for a time carried on his father's trade of tanner at Besançon, seems to have disappeared at the age of twenty-seven, leaving a small boy, Jean-Joseph Pasteur, born in 1791, who was brought up by his grandmother and his father's sister.

Caught in the close meshes of Napoleon's conscription, Jean-Joseph served in the Spanish campaign of 1812–13, as a private in the third regiment of infantry, called 'le brave parmi les braves.' In course of time he was promoted to be sergeant-major, and in March 1814 received the Cross of the Legion of Honour. Two months later the abdication had taken place; and the regiment was at Douai, reorganising under the name of Régiment Dauphin.' Here was no place for Jean-Joseph, devoted to the Imperial Eagle and unmoved by the Fleur-de-lys. He received his discharge, and made his way across country to his father's town, Besançon. At Besançon he took up his father's trade and became a tanner; and, after one feverish flush during the Hundred Days, and one contest, in which he came off victor, with the Royalist authorities, who would take his sword to arm the town police, he settled down into a quiet, law-abiding citizen, more occupied with domestic anxieties than with the fate of empires.

Hard by the tannery ran a stream, called La Furieuse, though it rarely justified its name. Across the stream dwelt a gardener named Roqui; amongst the gardener's daughters one Jeanne-Étiennette attracted the attention of, and was attracted by, this old campaigner of twentyfive years. The curious persistence of a family in one place, combined with the careful preservation of parish records, enables M. Vallery-Radot to trace the family Roqui back to the year 1555. We must content ourselves with Jeanne-Étiennette, who in 1815 married Jean-Joseph. Shortly afterwards the young couple moved to Dôle and set up house in the Rue des Tanneurs.

Louis Pasteur's father was a somewhat slow, reflective man; a little melancholic, not communicative; a man who lived an inner life, nourished doubtless on the memories of the part he had played on a larger stage than a tannery affords. His mother, on the other hand, was active in

business matters, hard-working, a woman of imagination, prompt in enthusiasm.

Before Louis Pasteur was two years old, his parents moved first to Marnoz and then to a tannery situated at the entrance to the village of Arbois; and it was Arbois that Pasteur regarded as his home, returning in later life year after year for the scanty absence from his laboratory that he annually allowed himself. Trained at the village school, he repeated with his father every evening the task of the day. He showed considerable talent, and his eagerness to learn was fostered by the interest taken in him by M. Romanet, principal of the College of Arbois. At sixteen he had exhausted the educational resources of the village; and, after much heart-searching and anxious deliberation, it was decided to send the young student to Paris to continue his studies at the Lycée Saint-Louis. It was a disastrous experiment. Removed so far from all he knew and loved, Louis suffered from an incurable home-sickness, which affected his health. His father hearing this came unannounced to Paris, and with the simple words 'Je viens te chercher' took him home. Here for a time he amused himself by sketching the portraits of neighbours and relatives, but his desire to learn was unquenched, and within a short time he entered as a student at the Royal College of Franche-Comté at Besançon. This picturesque town, situated only thirty miles from Arbois, was within easy reach of his home; and, above all, on market days his father came thither to sell his leather.

At eighteen Pasteur received the degree of Bachelier ès lettres, and almost immediately was occupied in teaching others; but Paris, although once abandoned, was again asserting its powers of attraction, and by the autumn of 1842 he was once more following the courses at the Lycée Saint-Louis. He also attended the brilliant lectures of Dumas at the Sorbonne, and vividly describes the scene: 'An audience of seven or eight hundred listeners, the too frequent applause, everything just like a theatre.' At the end of his first year in Paris he achieved his great ambition, and succeeded in entering the École Normale, and entering it with credit.

For the last year or two Pasteur had been studying mathematics and physics; at the École Normale he especi

ally devoted himself to chemistry. Under the teaching of Dumas and of Balard his enthusiasm redoubled, and he passed his final examinations with distinction. Balard was indeed a true friend. Shortly after the end of his career at the École Normale, the Minister of Public Instruction nominated Pasteur to a small post as teacher of physics at the Lycée of Tournon. But banishment from Paris meant banishment from a laboratory. Balard intervened, interviewed the Minister, and ended by attaching Pasteur to his staff of assistants.

It must always be remembered that Pasteur was trained as a chemist, was in fact a chemist. In after life he attacked problems proper to the biologist, the physiologist, the physician, the manufacturer; but he brought to bear on these problems, not the intellect of one trained in the traditions of natural science, medicine, or commerce, but the untrammelled intelligence of a richly-endowed mind, 'organised common-sense' of the highest order. After the legal, there is perhaps no learned profession so dominated by tradition, by what our fathers have taught us, as the medical; and the advances in preventive medicine which will ever be connected with Pasteur's name owe at least something to the fact that he was unfettered by any traditions of professional training or etiquette. Passing from the diseases of the lowest of the fungi, to those of a caterpillar, a fowl, a sheep, until he reached those of man himself, it must be acknowledged that he approached the art of healing along an entirely new path.

His first researches were purely chemical, 'On the capacity for saturation of arsenious acid,' 'Studies on the arsenates of potassium, soda, and ammonia'; but he had been early attracted to the remarkable observations of Mitscherlich and others on the optical properties of the crystals of tartaric acid and its salts. Ordinary tartaric acid crystals, when dissolved in water, turn the plane of polarised light to the right; but another kind of tartaric acid, called by Gay-Lussac racemic acid, and by Berzelius paratartaric acid-as M. Vallery-Radot remarks, the name does not matter, and each is equally terrifying to the lay mind-leaves it unaffected. In spite of the different actions of the solutions of these two acids on light, Mitscherlich held their chemical composition to be absolutely identical. This set Pasteur thinking. He repeated the experi