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as the good ones, that had followed the wholesale use of his vaccine?

"Such goings-on are perhaps suitable for the advertising of a business house, but science should reject them vigorously," finished Koch, drily, devastatingly.

Then Pasteur went through the roof and answered Koch’s cool facts in an amazing paper with arguments that would not have fooled the jury of a country debating society. Did Koch dare to make believe that Pasteur’s vaccines were full of contaminating microbes? "For twenty years before Koch's scientific birth in 1876, it has been my one occupation to isolate and grow microbes in a pure state, and therefore Koch’s insinuation that I do not know how to make pure cultivations cannot be taken seriously!" shouted Pasteur.

The French nation, even the great men of the nation, patriotically refused to believe that Koch had demoted their hero from the rank of God of Science—what could you expect from a German anyway?—and they promptly elected Pasteur to the Académie Française, the ultimate honor to bestow on a Frenchman. And on the day of Pasteur's admission this fiery yes-man was welcomed to his place among the Immortal Forty by the skeptical genius, Ernest Renan, the author who had changed Jesus from a God into a good human being, a man who could forgive everything because he understood everything. Renan knew that even if Pasteur sometimes did suppress the truth, he was still sufficiently marvelous. Renan was not a scientist but he was wise enough to know that Pasteur had done a wonderful thing when he showed that weak bugs may protect living beings against virulent ones—even if they would not do it one hundred times out of one hundred.

Regard these two fantastically opposite men facing each other on this solemn day. Pasteur the go-getter, an energetic fighter full of a mixture of faiths that interfered, sometimes, with ultimate—and maybe ugly—truth. And talking to him loftily sits the untroubled Renan with the massiveness of Mount Everest, such a dreadful skeptic that he probably was