Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/80

Success, fill human existence. Will opens the door to success both brilliant and happy; Work passes these doors, and at the end of the journey Success comes to crown one's efforts."

When he was seventy his sermons had lost their capital letters, but they were exactly the same kind of simple earnest sermons.

His father sent him up to Paris to the Normal School and there he resolved to do great things, but he was carried away by a homesickness for the smell of the tannery yard and he came back to Arbois abandoning his high ambition. . . . In another year he was back at the same school in Paris and this time he stuck at it; and then one day he passed in a tear-stained trance out of the lecture room of the chemist Dumas. "What a science is chemistry," he muttered, "and how marvelous is the popularity and glory of Dumas." He knew then that he was going to be a great chemist too; the misty gray streets of the Latin Quarter dissolved into a confused and frivolous world that chemistry alone could save. He had left off his painting but he was still the artist.

Presently he began to make his first stumbling independent researches with stinking bottles and rows of tubes filled with gorgeous colored fluids. His good friend Chappuis, a mere student of philosophy, had to listen for hours to Pasteur's lectures on the crystals of tartaric acid, and Pasteur told Chappuis: "It is sad that you are not a chemist too." He would have made all students chemists just as forty years later he tried to turn all doctors into microbe hunters.

Just then, as Pasteur was bending his snub nose and broad forehead over confused piles of crystals, the sub-visible living microbes were beginning to come back into serious notice, they were beginning to be thought of as important serious fellow creatures, just as useful as horses or elephants, by two lonely searchers, one in France and one in Germany. A modest but original Frenchman, Cagniard de la Tour, in 1837 poked round in beer vats of breweries. He dredged up a few foamy drops from such a vat and looked at them through a