“I shall be much obliged, Monsieur le Ministre, if you will kindly inform the Prefect of the Corrèze of the forecasts which I now impart to you, and if you will ask _him_ to report to you the results of Mademoiselle Amat’s three lots. “For my part, I feel so sure of what I now affirm, that I shall not even trouble to test, by hatching them, the samples which you have sent me. I have thrown them into the river....” J. B. Dumas had come to Alais, Messrs. Gernez and Duclaux now returned from their expeditions. In two hundred broods, each of one or two ounces of seed, coming from three different sources and hatched in various localities, not one failure was recorded. The Lyons Commission, which had made a note of Pasteur’s bold prognosis, found it absolutely correct; the excellence of the method was acknowledged by all who had conscientiously tried it. Now that the scourge was really conquered, Pasteur imagined that all he had to do was to set up a table of the results sent to him. But, from the south of France and from Corsica, jealousies were beginning their work of undermining; pseudo-scientists in their vanity proclaimed that everything was illusory that was outside their own affirmations, and the seed merchants, willing to ruin everybody rather than jeopardize their miserable interests, “did not hesitate (we are quoting M. Gernez) to perpetrate the most odious falsehoods.” Instead of being annoyed, saddened, often indignant as he was, Pasteur would have done more wisely to look back upon the history of most great discoveries and of the initial difficulties which beset them. But he could not look upon such things philosophically; stupidity astonished him and he could not easily bring himself to believe in bad faith. His friends in Alais society, M. de Lachadenède, M. Despeyroux, professor of chemistry, might have reminded him, in their evening conversations, of the difficulties ever encountered in the service of mankind. The prejudice against potatoes, for instance, had lasted three hundred years. When they were brought over from Peru in the fifteenth century, it was asserted that they caused leprosy; in the seventeenth century, that accusation was recognized to be absurd, but it was said that they caused fever. One century later, in 1771, the Besançon Academy of Medicine having opened a competition for the answer to the following question of general interest: “What plants can be used to supplement other foods in times of famine?” a military apothecary, named Parmentier, competed and proved victoriously that the potato was quite harmless. After that, he began a propagandist campaign in favour of potatoes. But prejudice still subsisted in spite of his experimental fields and of the dinners in the menu of which potatoes held a large place. Louis XVI had then an inspiration worthy of Henry IV; he appeared in public, wearing in his buttonhole Parmentier’s little mauve flower, and thus glorified it in the eyes of the Court and of the crowd.