“These reconstituting phenomena of crystalline redintegration afford a complete comparison with those presented by living beings in the case of a wound more or less deep. In the crystal as in the animal, the damaged part heals, gradually taking back its original shape, and in both cases the reformation of tissue is far more active in that particular part than under ordinary evolutive conditions.” Thus those two great minds saw affinities hidden under facts apparently far apart. Other similarities yet more unexpected carried Pasteur away towards the highest region of speculation. He spoke with enthusiasm of molecular dissymmetry; he saw it everywhere in the universe. These studies in dissymmetry gave birth twenty years later to a new science arising immediately out of his work, viz. stereo-chemistry, or the chemistry of space. He also saw in molecular dissymmetry the influence of a great cosmic cause-- “The universe,” he said one day, “is a dissymmetrical whole. I am inclined to think that life, as manifested to us, must be a function of the dissymmetry of the universe and of the consequences it produces. The universe is dissymmetrical; for, if the whole of the bodies which compose the solar system were placed before a glass moving with their individual movements, the image in the glass could not be superposed to the reality. Even the movement of solar life is dissymmetrical. A luminous ray never strikes in a straight line the leaf where vegetable life creates organic matter. Terrestrial magnetism, the opposition which exists between the north and south poles in a magnet, that offered us by the two electricities positive and negative, are but resultants from dissymmetrical actions and movements.” “Life,” he said again, “is dominated by dissymmetrical actions. I can even foresee that all living species are primordially, in their structure, in their external forms, functions of cosmic dissymmetry.” And there appeared to him to be a barrier between mineral or artificial products and products formed under the influence of life. But he did not look upon it as an impassable one, and he was careful to say, “It is a distinction of fact and not of absolute principle.” As nature elaborates immediate principles of life by means of dissymmetrical forces, he wished that the chemist should imitate nature, and that, breaking with methods founded upon the exclusive use of symmetrical forces, he should bring dissymmetrical forces to bear upon the production of chemical phenomena. He himself, after using powerful magnets to attempt to introduce a manifestation of dissymmetry into the form of crystals, had had a strong clockwork movement constructed, the object of which was to keep a plant in continual rotatory motion first in one direction then in another. He also proposed to try to keep a plant alive, from its germination under the influence of solar rays reversed by means of a mirror directed by a heliostat.