incomplete, of that great mind.” Pasteur, after the experiment at the Académie de Médecine, hurried back to his laboratory and read with avidity those last notes of Claude Bernard. Were they a precious find, explaining the secrets Claude Bernard had hinted at? “Should I,” said Pasteur, “have to defend my work, this time against that colleague and friend for whom I professed deep admiration, or should I come across unexpected revelations, weakening and discrediting the results I thought I had definitely established?” His reading reassured him on that point, but saddened him on the other hand. Since Claude Bernard had neither desired nor even authorized the publication of those notes, why, said Pasteur, were they not accompanied by an experimental commentary? Thus Claude Bernard would have been credited with what was good in his MSS., and he would not have been held responsible for what was incomplete or defective. “As for me, personally,” wrote Pasteur in the first pages of his _Critical Examination of a Posthumous Work of Claude Bernard on Fermentation_, “I found myself cruelly puzzled; had I the right to consider Claude Bernard’s MS. as the expression of his thought, and was I free to criticize it thoroughly?” The table of contents and headings of chapters in Claude Bernard’s incomplete MS. condemned Pasteur’s work on alcoholic fermentation. The non-existence of life without air; the ferment not originated by exterior germs; alcohol formed by a soluble ferment outside life ... such were Claude Bernard’s conclusions. “If Claude Bernard was convinced,” thought Pasteur, “that he held the key to the masterly conclusions with which he ended his manuscript, what could have been his motive in withholding it from me? I looked back upon the many marks of kindly affection which he had given me since I entered on a scientific career, and I came to the conclusion that the notes left by Bernard were but a programme of studies, that he had tackled the subject, and that, following in this a method habitual to him, he had, the better to discover the truth, formed the intention of trying experiments which might contradict my opinions and results.”