Louis Pasteur

16 LOUIS PASTEUR
cepts. But the great actors no longer perform for the public, and
tibe audience has lost its glamour. Gone are the days when such
men as Davy, Faraday, Tyndall, Huxley, Helmholtz, Cuvier,
Salnt-Hilaire, Arago, Bernard and Pasteur introduced in simple
and elegant but also accurate terms the true concepts and
achievements of science and the mental processes of scientists
to appreciative audiences of children and adults, artisans and
artists, earnest scholars and fashionable ladies. The great pageant
of science is still unfolding; but now, hidden behind drawn cur-
tains, it is without audience and understandable only to the players.
At the stage door, a few talkative and misinformed charlatans
sell to the public crude imitations of the great rites. The world is
promised cheap miracles, but no longer participates in the glorious
mysteries.
As a token of its respect for science, the nineteenth century
bestowed upon many scientists honors and privileges as great as
those which are today the monopoly of soldiers, politicians and
businessmen. During Davy's illness in 1807, bulletins on the state
of his health were issued similar to those published for royalty;
eminent medical specialists refused to accept fees for their serv-
ices. His convalescence stimulated public subscriptions which
yielded sufficient funds for the construction of large voltaic bat-
teries to be used in the furtherance of his work. Despite the early
conflict between the doctrine of evolution and Christian dogma,
Darwin, loaded with awards and honors during his lifetime, was
buried with High Church ceremony in Westminster Abbey. In
France, Cuvier remained one of the important personages of the
state under Napoleon I, Louis XVIII and Charles X. The chemist
Jean Baptiste Dumas and the
physiologist Paul Bert passed from
their chairs of the Sorbonne to the highest seats of government
during the Second Empire and the Third Republic. Claude Bernard,
Olympic in his aloofness from practical medicine, was made
a senator without his
asking;
his funeral, like that of Darwin, was
a national event attended by the highest officials of the state.
Napoleon III entertained the famous men of science at court in
Paris and Rambouillet. There Pasteur, even before the studies on