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balloon, for his hearers were already sufficiently astonished. Already they considered him to be more than a man of science; he became for them a composer of epic searchings, a Ulysses of microbe hunters—the first adventurer of that heroic age to which you will soon come in this story.

Many times Pasteur won his arguments by brilliant experiments that simply floored every one, but sometimes his victories were due to the weakness or silliness of his opponents, and again they were the result of—luck. Before a society of chemists Pasteur had insulted the scientific ability of naturalists; he was astonished, he shouted, that naturalists didn't stretch out a hand to the real way of doing science—that is, to experiments. "I am of the persuasion that that would put a new sap into their science," he said. You can imagine how the naturalists liked that kind of talk; particularly Mr. Pouchet, director of the Museum of Rouen, did not like it and he was enthusiastically joined in not liking it by Professor Joly and Mr. Musset, famous naturalists of the College of Toulouse. Nothing could convince these enemies of Pasteur that microscopic beasts did not come to life without parents. They were sure there was such a thing as life arising spontaneously; they decided to beat Pasteur on his own ground at his own game.

Like Pasteur they filled up some flasks, but unlike him they used a soup of hay instead of yeast, they made a vacuum in their bottles and hastened to high Maladetta in the Pyrenees, and they kept climbing until they had got up many feet higher than Pasteur had been on Mont Blanc. Here, beaten upon by nasty breezes that howled out of the caverns of the glaciers and sneaked through the thick linings of their coats, they opened their flasks—Mr. Joly almost slid off the edge of the ledge and was only saved from a scientific martyr's death when a guide grabbed him by the coat tail! Out of breath and chilled through and through they staggered back to a little tavern and put their flasks in an improvised incubating oven—and in a few days, to their joy, they found every one of their bottles swarming with little creatures. Pasteur was wrong!