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him until their necks grew stiff and their backs ached grievously; he painted curiously harsh unflattering pictures of his mother—they didn't make her look pretty, but they looked like his mother. . . .

Meanwhile it seemed perfectly certain that the little animals were going to be put permanently on the shelf along with the dodo and other forgotten beasts. The Swede Linnæus, most enthusiastic pigeonholer, who toiled at putting all living things in a neat vast card catalogue, threw up his hands at the very idea of studying the wee beasts. "They are too small, too confused, no one will ever know anything exact about them, we will simply put them in the class of Chaos!" said Linnæus. They were only defended by the famous round-faced German Ehrenberg who had immense quarrels—in moments when he wasn't crossing oceans or receiving medals—futile quarrels about whether the little animals had stomachs, strange arguments about whether they were really complete little animals or only parts of larger animals; or whether perchance they might be little vegetables instead of little animals.

Pasteur kept plugging at his books though, and it was while he was still at the little college of Arbois that the first of his masterful traits began to stick out—traits good and bad, that made him one of the strangest mixtures of contradictions that ever lived. He was the youngest boy at the college, but he wanted to be a monitor; he had a fiery ambition to teach other boys, particularly to run other boys. He became a monitor. Before he was twenty he had become a kind of assistant teacher in the college of Bezançon, and here he worked like the devil and insisted that everybody else work as hard as he worked himself; he preached in long inspirational letters to his poor sisters—who, God bless them, were already trying their best—

"To will is a great thing, dear sisters," he wrote, "for Action and Work usually follow Will, and almost always Work is accompanied by Success. These three things, Work, Will,