Note 16 — Chapter XI · THE PROFESSOR: AVIGNON (CONTINUED)

When Pasteur was called upon to regenerate sericulture, the silk-worm disease had been known for twenty years. During that period much research had been undertaken and many efforts had been made, in France as well as in Italy, to discover the nature of the affection and to fight it. But “of all this story, a mixture of truth and falsehood, Pasteur knew nothing when he began his researches.” More—and this was what astonished Fabre—he knew nothing of the physiology or the rearing of the silk-worm. “For the first time he has seen a cocoon, and has learned that there is something in the cocoon, a rough model of the future moth,” … and he is about to revolutionise the hygiene of the silk-worm nurseries and is preparing to revolutionise medicine and general hygiene in the same way,16 by showing that the maladies of silk-worms and most of our human maladies arise from the development in the tissues of a microscopic living entity, a microbe, the cause of the malady. And while his other discoveries won for him only fame and the admiration of his contemporaries, this will give him immortality and place him in the front rank of the benefactors of humanity. Decidedly ignorance may have its advantages.