Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/110
his students shed tears of emotion at the fiery eloquence of his lectures. He talked about microbes causing disease long before he knew anything about whether or not they caused disease—he hadn't yet got his fingers at the throats of mysterious plagues and dreadful deaths, but he knew there were other ways to interest the public, to arouse even such a hardheaded person as the average Frenchman.
"I beg you," he addressed the French people in a passionate pamphlet, "take some interest in those sacred dwellings meaningly called laboratories. Ask that they be multiplied and completed. They are the temples of the future, of riches and comfort." Fifty years ahead of his time as a forward-looking prophet, he held fine austere ideals up to his countrymen while he appealed to their wishes for a somewhat piggish material happiness. A good microbe hunter, he was much more than a mere woolgathering searcher, much more than a mere man of science. . . .
Once more he started out to show all of France how science could save money for her industry; he packed up boxes of glassware and an eager assistant, Duclaux, and bustled off to Arbois, his old home—he hurried off up there to study the diseases of wine—to save the imperiled wine industry. He set up his laboratory in what had been an old café and instead of gas burners he had to be satisfied with an open charcoal brazier that the enthusiastic Duclaux kept glowing with a pair of bellows; from time to time Duclaux would scamper across to the town pump for water; their clumsy apparatus was made by the village carpenter and tinsmith. Pasteur rushed around to his friends of long ago and begged bottles of wine, bitter wine, ropy wine, oily wine; he knew from his old researches that it was yeasts that changed grapejuice into wine—he felt certain that it must be some other wee microscopic being that made wines go bad.
Sure enough! When he turned his lens on to ropy wines he found them swarming with very tiny curious microbes hitched together like strings of beads; he found the bottles of bitter