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prophet rose the whole corps of the doctors of Paris, headed by the distinguished brass-buttoned Doctor Pidoux.

"What!" roared this Pidoux, "consumption due to a germ—one definite kind of germ? Nonsense! A fatal thought! Consumption is one and many at the same time. Its conclusion is the necrobiotic and infecting destruction of the plasmatic tissue of an organ by a number of roads that the hygienist and the physician must endeavor to close!" It was so that the doctors fought Pasteur's prophecies with utterly meaningless and often idiotic words.

Koch was spending his evenings fussing with his new microscope, he was beginning to find out just the right amount of light to shoot up into its lens with the reflecting mirror, he was learning just how needful it was to have his thin glass slides shining clean—those bits of glass on which he liked to put drops of blood from the carcasses of sheep and cows, that had died of anthrax. . . .

Anthrax was a strange disease which was worrying farmers all over Europe, that here and there ruined some prosperous owner of a thousand sheep, that in another place sneaked in and killed the cow—the one support—of a poor widow. There was no rime or reason to the way this plague conducted its maraudings; one day a fat lamb in a flock might be frisking about, that evening this same lamb refused to eat, his head drooped a little—and the next morning the farmer would find him cold and stiff, his blood turned ghastly black. Then the same thing would happen to another lamb, and a sheep, four sheep, six sheep—there was no stopping it. And then the farmer himself, and a shepherd, and a woolsorter, and a dealer in hides might break out in horrible boils—or gasp out their last breaths in a swift pneumonia.

Koch had started using his microscope with the more or less thorough aimlessness of old Leeuwenhoek; he examined