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said, and dreamed: "This beast will show that my idea will work. . . ."

Sure enough, less than two weeks later the good creature began to howl mournful cries and tear up his bed and gnaw at his cage—and in a few days more he was dead, and this brute died, as you will see, so that thousands of mankind might live.

Now Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland had a sure way, that worked one hundred times out of one hundred, of giving rabies to their dogs and guinea-pigs and rabbits. "We cannot find the microbe—surely it must be too tiny for the strongest microscope to show us—there's no way to grow it in flasks of soup . . . but we can keep it alive—this deadly virus—in the brains of rabbits . . . that is the only way to grow it," you can hear Pasteur telling Roux and Chamberland.

Never was there a more fantastic experiment in all of microbe hunting, or in any science, for that matter; never was there a more unscientific feat of science than this struggling, by Pasteur and his boys, with a microbe they couldn't see—a weird bug of whose existence they only knew by its invisible growth in the living brains and spinal cords of an endless succession of rabbits and guinea-pigs and dogs. Their only knowledge that there was such a thing as the microbe of rabies was the convulsive death of the rabbits they injected, and the fearful cries of their trephined dogs. . . .

Then Pasteur and his assistants started on their outlandish—any wise man would say their impossible—adventure of taming this vicious virus that they could not see. There were little interruptions; Roux went with Thuillier to fight the cholera in Egypt and there, you will remember, Thuillier died; and Pasteur went out into the rural pig-sties of France to discover the microbe and find a vaccine against a disease that was just then murdering French swine. But Pasteur stopped getting entangled in those vulgar arguments which were so often to his discredit, and the three of them locked themselves in their laboratory in the Rue d’Ulm with their poor paralyzed and