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these ten flasks was filled to the neck in a few days with the pink foam of a good fermentation. There was a little of the wash water left; he boiled that and put drops of this through the straight tubes of ten more flasks. "Just so!" he cried a few days later, "there's no fermentation in these flasks, the boiling has killed the yeasts in the wash water."

"Now I shall do the most remarkable experiment of all—I'll prove to this ignorant Frémy that there are no yeasts inside of ripe grapes," and he took a little hollow tube with a sharp point, sealed shut; it was a little tube he had heated very hot in an oven to kill all life—all yeasts—that might have been in it. Carefully he forced the sharp closed point of the tube through the skin into the middle of the grape; delicately he broke the sealed tip inside the grape—and the little drop of juice that welled up into the tube he transferred with devilish cunning into another swan-necked flask part filled with grape juice. A few days later he cried, "That finishes Frémy—there is no fermentation in this flask at all—there is no yeast inside the grape!" He went on to one of those sweeping statements he loved to make: "Microbes never rise by themselves inside of grapes, or silkworms, or inside of healthy animals—in animal's blood or urine. All microbes have to get in from the outside! That settles Frémy." Then you can fancy him whispering to himself: "The world will soon learn the miracles that will grow from this little experiment."

Surely it looked then as if Pasteur had a right to his fantastic dreams of wiping out disease. He had just received a worshiping letter from the English surgeon Lister—and this letter told of a scheme for cutting up sick people in safety, of doing operations in a way that kept out that deadly mysterious infection that in many hospitals killed eight people out of ten. "Permit me," wrote Lister, "to thank you cordially for having shown me the truth of the theory of germs of putrefaction by