into the Botanical Section, as you might safely have done for Théodore de Saussure or Ingenhousz, you will have acquired for the Académie and for that particular section an experimentalist of the same order as those two great men.” Balard, who in this academic campaign made common cause with Biot, was also making efforts to persuade several members of the Botanical Section. He was walking one day in the Luxembourg with Moquin-Tandon, pouring out, in his rasping voice, arguments in favour of Pasteur. “Well,” said Moquin-Tandon, “let us go to Pasteur’s, and if you find a botanical work in his library I shall put him on the list.” It was a witty form given to the scruples of the botanists. Pasteur only had twenty-four votes; Duchartre was elected. The study of a microscopic fungus, capable by itself of transforming wine into vinegar, the bringing to light of the action of that mycoderma, endowed with the power of taking oxygen from air and fixing it upon alcohol, thus transforming the latter into acetic acid; the most ingenious experiments to demonstrate the absolute and exclusive power of the little plant, all gave reason to Biot’s affirmation that such skill in the observation of inferior vegetables equalled any botanist’s claim. Pasteur, showing that the interpretations of the causes which act in the formation of vinegar were false, and that alone the microscopic fungus did everything, was constantly dwelling on this power of the infinitesimally small. “Mycoderma,” he said, “can bring the action of combustion of the oxygen in air to bear on a number of organic materia. If microscopic beings were to disappear from our globe, the surface of the earth would be encumbered with dead organic matter and corpses of all kinds, animal and vegetable. It is chiefly they who give to oxygen its powers of combustion. Without them, life would become impossible because death would be incomplete.” Pasteur’s ideas on fermentation and putrefaction were being adopted by disciples unknown to him. “I am sending you,” he wrote to his father, “a treatise on fermentation, which was the subject of a recent competition at the Montpellier Faculty. This work is dedicated to me by its author, whom I do not know at all, a circumstance which shows that my results are spreading and exciting some attention. “I have only read the last pages, which have pleased me; if the rest is the same, it is a very good _résumé_, entirely conceived in the new direction of my labours, evidently well understood by this young doctor. “M. Biot is very well, only suffering a little from insomnia. He has, fortunately for his health, finished that great account of my former results which will be the greatest title I can have to the esteem of scientists.”