n the merit of the first discovery of the method of
anaesthesia. Even had some other drug subsequently quite banished ether,
the honor of the discovery of the beneficent method of anaesthesia would
have been in no wise invalidated. And despite all cavillings, it is
unequivocally established that the man who gave that method to the world
was William T. G. Morton.

PASTEUR AND THE GERM THEORY OF DISEASE

The discovery of the anaesthetic power of drugs was destined presently,
in addition to its direct beneficences, to aid greatly in the progress
of scientific medicine, by facilitating those experimental studies
of animals from which, before the day of anaesthesia, many humane
physicians were withheld, and which in recent years have led to
discoveries of such inestimable value to humanity. But for the moment
this possibility was quite overshadowed by the direct benefits of
anaesthesia, and the long strides that were taken in scientific medicine
during the first fifteen years after Morton's discovery were mainly
independent of such aid. These steps were taken, indeed, in a field
that at first glance might seem to have a very slight connection with
medicine. Moreover, the chief worker in the field was not himself a
physician. He was a chemist, and the work in which he was now engaged
was the study of alcoholic fermentation in vinous liquors. Yet these
studies paved the way for the most important advances that medicine has
made in any century towards the plane of true science; and to this man
more than to any other single individual--it might almost be said more
than to all other individuals--was due this wonderful advance. It is
almost superfluous to add that the name of this marvellous chemist was
Louis Pasteur.

The studies of fermentation which Pasteur entered upon in 1854 were
aimed at the solution of a controversy that had been waging in the
scientific world with varying degrees of activity for a quarter of a
century. Back in the thirties, in the day of the early enthusiasm over
the perfected microscope, there had arisen a new interest in the minute
forms of life which Leeuwenhoek and some of the other early workers with
the lens had first described, and which now were shown to be of almost
universal prevalence. These minute organisms had been studied more or
less by a host of observers, but in particular by the Frenchman Cagniard
Latour and the German of cell-theory fame, Theodor Schwann. These men,
working indepen