When, only a few years ago, Professor Duclaux, Pasteur's successor as the head of the Pasteur Institute, and himself one of the greatest living authorities on biological chemistry, wrote the story of the mind of the master, [Footnote 14] he said, of this subject of dissymmetry: "A living cell appears to us, then, as a laboratory of dissymmetrical forces, a bit of dissymmetrical protoplasm acting under the influence of the sun--that is to say, under the influence of exterior dissymmetrical forces. It presides over actions of very different kinds. It can manufacture, in its turn, new dissymmetrical substances which add to or take away from its energy. It can, for instance, utilize one of the elements of a paratartrate without touching another. It can manufacture crystalline sugar at one moment and consume it at another, laying by stores for itself to-day using them up to-morrow. In a word, the living cell {303} presents a marvellous plasticity, which exerts itself without the slightest disturbance by minimal deviations of forces due to dissymmetrical influence. Ah, if spontaneous generation were only possible! If we could only create living matter, raise up in the midst of inactive mineral material a living cell, then it would be easy for us to understand something more of vital manifestations and to comprehend better the mystery of dissymmetry." [Footnote 14: L'Histoire d'un esprit, par M. Duclaux, Paris, 1896.] But spontaneous generation is as far off as ever. Pasteur's discoveries in dissymmetry have brought us closer than ever before to the mystery of life. Scientists still hope, but it is with ever-waning confidence, that they may pluck out the heart of the mystery. Pasteur's own thoughts with regard to dissymmetry rose above even the lofty heights of mere earthly biology. He saw in it the great force that links the universe together. On one occasion, at the Academy of Sciences, he expressed himself as follows: "The universe is a dissymmetrical whole. I am inclined to think that life, as manifested to us, must be a function of the dissymmetry of the universe or of the consequences that follow in its train. The universe is dissymmetrical; for, placing before a mirror the group of bodies which compose the solar system with their proper movement, we obtain in the mirror an image not superposable on the reality. Even the motion of solar light is dissymmetrical. A luminous ray never strikes in a straight line. Terrestrial magnetism, the opposition which exists between the north and the south poles of a magnet, the opposition presented to us by positive and negative electricity, are all the resultants of dissymmetrical actions and motions."