Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/115

each couple of moths, the father and the mother. Let them mate; let the mother lay her eggs—then pin the father and mother moths down onto a little board, slit open their bellies and take out a little of the fatty tissue under their skin; put this under a microscope and look for those tiny globules. If you can't find any, you can be sure the eggs are sound—you can use those eggs for new silkworms in the spring."

The committee looked at the shining microscope. "We farmers can't run a machine like that," they objected. They were suspicious, they didn't believe in this newfangled machine. Then the salesman that was in Pasteur came to the front. "Nonsense!" he answered. "There is an eight-year-old girl in my laboratory who handles this microscope easily and is perfectly able to spot these little globules—these corpuscles— and then you grown men try to tell me you couldn't learn to use a microscope!" So he shamed them. And the committee obediently bought microscopes and tried to follow his directions. Then Pasteur started a hectic life; he was everywhere around the tragic silk country, lecturing, asking innumerable questions, teaching the farmers to use microscopes, rushing back to the laboratory to direct his assistants—he directed them to do complicated experiments that he hadn't time to do, or even watch, himself—and in the evenings he dictated answers to letters and scientific papers and speeches to Madame Pasteur. The next morning he was off again to the neighboring towns, cheering up despairing farmers and haranguing them. . . .

But the next spring his bubble burst, alas. The next spring, when it came time for the worms to climb their mulberry twigs to spin their silk cocoons, there was a horrible disaster. His confident prophecy to the farmers did not come true. These honest people glued their eyes to their microscopes to pick out the healthy moths, so as to get healthy eggs, eggs without the evil globules in them—and these supposed healthy eggs hatched worms, sad to tell, who grew miserably, languid worms who would not eat, strange worms who failed to molt, sick worms