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AND THE MAD DOG
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by the Man of Galilee, and that day Pasteur's whole audience—who many of them had been snickering skeptics—bowed down before this excitable little half-paralyzed man who could so perfectly protect living creatures from the deadly stings of sub-visible invaders. To me this beautiful experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort is an utterly strange event in the history of man's fight against relentless nature. There is no record of Prometheus bringing the precious fire to mankind amid applause; Galileo was actually clapped in prison for those searchings that have done more than any other to transform the world. We do not even know the names of those completely anonymous genuises who first built the wheel and invented sails and thought to tame a horse.

VI

But here stood Louis Pasteur, while his twenty-four immune sheep scampered about among the carcasses of the same number of pitiful dead ones, here stood this man, I say, in a gruesomely gorgeous stage-setting of an immortal drama, and all the world was there to see and to record and to be converted to his own faith in his passionate fight against needless death.

Now the experiment turned into the likeness of a revival. Doctor Biot, a healer in horses who had been one of the most sarcastic of the Pasteur-baiters, rushed up to him as the last of the not-vaccinated sheep was dying, and cried: "Inoculate me with your vaccines, Mr. Pasteur—just as you have done to those sheep you have saved so wonderfully—— Then I will submit to the injection of the murderous virus! All men must be convinced of this marvelous discovery!"

"It is true," said another humbled enemy, "that I have made jokes about microbes, but I am a repentant sinner!"

"Well, allow me to remind you of the words of the Gospel," Pasteur answered him. "Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance."