Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/77

In 1831, thirty-two years after the magnificent Spallanzani died, microbe hunting had come to a standstill once more. The sub-visible animals were despised and forgotten while other sciences were making great leaps ahead; clumsy horribly coughing locomotives were scaring the horses of Europe and America; the telegraph was getting ready to be invented. Marvelous microscopes were being devised, but no man had come to squint through these machines—no man had come to prove to the world that miserable little animals could do useful work which no complicated steam engine could attempt; there was no hint of the somber fact that these wretched microbes could kill their millions of human beings mysteriously and silently, that they were much more efficient murderers than the guillotine or the cannon of Waterloo.

On a day in October in 1831, a nine-year-old boy ran frightened away from the edge of a crowd that blocked the door of the blacksmith shop of a village in the mountains of eastern France. Above the awed excited whispers of the people at the door this boy had heard the crackling "s-s-s-s-z" of a white hot iron on human flesh, and this terrifying sizzling had been followed by a groan of pain. The victim was the farmer Nicole. He had just been mangled by a mad wolf that charged howling, jaws dripping poison foam, through the streets of the village. The boy who ran away was Louis Pas-