Pasteur undertook the rest himself. He went to the Ministry to complain of the injustice and unfairness, from a general point of view, of that nomination.
“Sir,” answered the Chaumont exile, “I have received your kind letter. My deep respect for every word of yours will guarantee my intention to follow your advice. I have given myself up entirely to my class. I have found here a Physics cabinet in a deplorable state, and I have undertaken to reorganise it.”
He had not time to finish: justice was done, and Paul Dalimier was made _maître des conférences_ at the Ecole Normale. He died at twenty-eight.
The wish that masters and pupils should remain in touch with each other after the three years at the Ecole Normale had already in 1859 inspired Pasteur to write a report on the desirableness of an annual report entitled, _Scientific Annals of the Ecole Normale_.
The initiative of pregnant ideas often is traced back to France. But, through want of tenacity, she allows those same ideas to fall into decay and they are taken up by other nations, transplanted, developed, until they come back unrecognized to their mother country. Germany had seen the possibilities of such a publication as Pasteur’s projected _Annals_. Renan wrote about that time to the editors of the _Revue Germanique_, a Review intended to draw France and Germany together: “In France, nothing is made public until achieved and ripened. In Germany, a work is given out provisionally, not as a teaching, but as an incitement to think, as a ferment for the mind.”
Pasteur felt all the power of that intellectual ferment. In the volume entitled _Centenary of the Ecole Normale_, M. Gernez has recalled Pasteur’s enthusiasm when he spoke of those _Annals_. Was it not for former pupils, away in the provinces, a means of collaborating with their old masters and of keeping in touch with Paris?
It was in June, 1864, that Pasteur presented the first number of this publication to the Académie des Sciences. M. Gernez, who was highly thought of by Pasteur, has not related in the _Centenary_ that the book opened with some of his own researches on the rotatory power of certain liquids and their steam.
At that same time, the heterogenists had at last placed themselves at the disposal of the Académie and were invited to meet Pasteur before the Natural History Commission at M. Chevreul’s laboratory. “I affirm,” said Pasteur, “that in any place it is possible to take up from the ambient atmosphere a determined volume of air containing neither egg nor spore and producing no generation in putrescible solutions.” The Commission declared that, the whole contest bearing upon one simple fact, one experiment only should take place. The heterogenists wanted to recommence a whole series of experiments, thus reopening the discussion. The Commission refused, and the heterogenists, unwilling to concede the point, retired from the field, repudiating the arbiters that they had themselves chosen.