Biot now constituted himself the sponsor in scientific matters of his new young friend, and undertook to report upon Pasteur’s paper entitled: “_Researches on the relations which may exist between crystalline form, chemical composition, and the direction of rotatory power_”--destined for the Académie des Sciences. Biot did full justice to Pasteur; he even rendered him homage, and--not only in his own name but also in that of his three colleagues, Regnault, Balard, and Dumas--he suggested that the Académie should declare its highest approbation of Pasteur’s treatise. Pasteur did not conceive greater happiness than his laboratory life, and yet the laboratories of that time were very unlike what they are nowadays, as we should see if the laboratories of the Collège de France, of the Sorbonne, of the Ecole Normale had been preserved. They were all that Paris could offer Europe, and Europe certainly had no cause to covet them. Nowadays the most humble college, in the smallest provincial town, would not accept such dens as the State offered (when it offered them any) to the greatest French scientists. Claude Bernard, Magendie’s curator, worked at the Collège de France in a regular cellar. Wurtz only had a lumber-room in the attics of the Dupuytren Museum. Henri Sainte Claire Deville, before he became head of the Besançon Faculty, had not even as much; he was relegated to one of the most miserable corners of the Rue Lafarge. J. B. Dumas did not care to occupy the unhealthy room reserved for him at the Sorbonne; his father-in-law, Alexandre Brongniart, having given him a small house in the Rue Cuvier, opposite the Jardin des Plantes, he had had it transformed into a laboratory and was keeping it up at his own expense. He was therefore comfortably situated, but he was exceptionally fortunate. Every scientist who had no private means to draw upon had to choose between the miserable cellars and equally miserable garrets which were all that the State could offer. And yet it was more tempting than a Professor’s chair in a College or even in a Faculty, for there one could not give oneself up entirely to one’s work.