Alluding to the scientific supremacy of France during the early part of the nineteenth century, Pasteur wrote: “All the other nations acknowledged our superiority, though each could take pride in some great men: Berzelius in Sweden, Davy in England, Volta in Italy, other eminent men in Germany and Switzerland; but in no country were they as numerous as in France....” He added these regretful lines: “A victim of her political instability, France has done nothing to keep up, to propagate and to develop the progress of science in our country; she has merely obeyed a given impulse; she has lived on her past, thinking herself great by the scientific discoveries to which she owed her material prosperity, but not perceiving that she was imprudently allowing the sources of those discoveries to become dry, whilst neighbouring nations, stimulated by her past example, were diverting for their own benefit the course of those springs, rendering them fruitful by their works, their efforts and their sacrifices. “Whilst Germany was multiplying her universities, establishing between them the most salutary emulation, bestowing honours and consideration on the masters and doctors, creating vast laboratories amply supplied with the most perfect instruments, France, enervated by revolutions, ever vainly seeking for the best form of government, was giving but careless attention to her establishments for higher education.... “The cultivation of science in its highest expression is perhaps even more necessary to the moral condition than to the material prosperity of a nation. “Great discoveries--the manifestations of thought in Art, in Science and in Letters, in a word the disinterested exercise of the mind in every direction and the centres of instruction from which it radiates, introduce into the whole of Society that philosophical or scientific spirit, that spirit of discernment, which submits everything to severe reasoning, condemns ignorance and scatters errors and prejudices. They raise the intellectual level and the moral sense, and through them the Divine idea itself is spread abroad and intensified.” At the very time when Pasteur was preoccupied with the desire of directing the public mind towards the principles of truth, justice and sovereign harmony, Sainte Claire Deville, speaking of the Academy, expressed similar ideas, proclaiming that France had been vanquished by science and that it was now time to free scientific bodies from the tyranny of red tape. Why should not the Academy become the centre of all measures relating to science, independently of government offices or officials?