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planted anthrax bacilli was swarming with unbidden guests, contaminating microbes of the air that had sneaked in. The following morning he observed that there were no anthrax germs left at all; they had been completely choked out by the bacilli from the air.

At once Pasteur jumped to a fine idea: "If the harmless bugs from the air choke out the anthrax bacilli in the bottle, they will do it in the body too! It is a kind of dog-eat-dog!" shouted Pasteur, and at once he put Roux and Chamberland to work on the fantastic experiment of giving guinea-pigs anthrax and then shooting doses of billions of harmless microbes into them—beneficent germs which were to chase the anthrax bacilli round the body and devour them—they were to be like the mongoose which kills cobras. . . .

Pasteur gravely announced: "That there were high hopes for the cure of disease from this experiment," but that is the last you hear of it, for Pasteur was never a man to give the world of science the benefit of studying his failures. But a little later the Academy of Sciences sent him on a queer errand, and on this mission he stumbled across a fact that gave him the first clew to a genuine, a remarkable way of turning savage microbes into friendly ones. It was an outlandish plan he began to devise, to dream about, of turning living microbes of disease against their own kind, so guarding animals and men from invisible deaths. At this time there was a great to-do about a cure for anthrax, invented by the horse doctor, Louvrier, in the Jura mountains in the east of France. Louvrier had cured hundreds of cows who were at death's door, said the influential men of the district: it was time that this treatment received scientific approval.

Pasteur arrived there, escorted by his young assistants, and found that this miraculous cure consisted first, in having several farm hands rub the sick cow violently to make her as