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never quite convinced that he was himself alive, so firmly doubting the value of doing anything that he had become one of the fattest men in France.

Renan called Pasteur a genius and compared him to some of the greatest men that ever lived and then gave the excited, paralyzed, gray-haired, microbe hunter this mild admonition:

"Truth, Sir, is a great coquette; she will not be sought with too much passion, but often is most amenable to indifference. She escapes when apparently caught, but gives herself up if patiently waited for; revealing herself after farewells have been said, but inexorable when loved with too much fervor."

Surely Renan was too wise to think that his lovely words would ever change Pasteur one jot from the headlong untruthful hunter after truth that he was. But just the same, these words sum up the fundamental sadness of Pasteur’s life, they tell of the crown of thorns that madmen wear whose dream it is to change a world in the little seventy years they are allowed to live.

And now Pasteur began—God knows why—to stick little hollow glass tubes into the gaping mouths of dogs writhing mad with rabies. While two servants pried apart and held open the jowls of a powerful bulldog, Pasteur stuck his beard within a couple of inches of those fangs whose snap meant the worst of deaths, and, sprinkled sometimes with a maybe fatal spray, he sucked up the froth into his tube—to get a specimen in which to hunt for the microbe of hydrophobia. I wish to forget, now, everything that I have said about his showmanship, his unsearcherlike go-gettings. This business of his gray eyes looking that bulldog in the mouth—this was no grandstand stuff.

Why did Pasteur set out to trap the germ of rabies? That is a mystery, because there were a dozen other serious diseases, just then, whose microbes had not yet been found, dis-