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it!" Pasteur hated to go South to try to find out what ailed silkworms, he knew he risked a horrid failure by going and he detested failure above everything. But it is one of the charming things about him that in the midst of all his arrogance, his vulgar sureness of himself, he had kept that boyish love and reverence for his old master—so he said to Dumas: "I am in your hands, I'm at your disposal, do with me as you wish—I will go!"

So he went. He packed up the never complaining Madame Pasteur and the children and a microscope and three energetic and worshiping young assistants and he went into the epidemic that was slaughtering millions of silkworms and ruining the South of France. Knowing less of silkworms and their sicknesses than a babe in swaddling clothes he arrived in Alais; he got there and he learned that a silkworm spins a cocoon round itself and turns into a chrysalid inside the cocoon; he found out that the chrysalid changes into a moth that climbs out and lays eggs—which hatch out the next spring into new broods of young silkworms. The silkworm growers—disgusted at his great ignorance—told him that the disease which was killing their worms was called pébrine, because the sick worms were covered with little black spots that looked like pepper. Pasteur found out that there were a thousand or so theories about the sickness, but that the little pepper spots—and the curious little globules inside the sick worms, wee globules that you could only see with a microscope—were the only facts that were known about it.

Then Pasteur unlimbered his microscope, before he had got his family settled—he was like one of those trout fishing maniacs who starts to cast without thought of securing his canoe safely on the bank—he unlimbered his microscope, I say, and began to peer at the insides of sick worms, and particularly at these wee globules. Quickly he concluded that the globules were a sure sign of the disease. Fifteen days after he had come to Alais he called the Agricultural Committee together and told them: "At the moment of egg-laying put aside