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MICROBES ARE A MENACE!
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health watching them and he violated sacred customs of all good middle-class Frenchmen. He writes of how he sat down before his lens at seven in the evening—and this is the dinner hour of France!—he sat down to watch and see if he could spy on his yeasts in the act of budding. "And from that time," he writes, "I did not take my eye from the microscope." It was half past nine before he was satisfied that he had seen them bud. He made vast crazy tests that lasted from June until September to find out how long yeasts would keep at their work of turning sugar into alcohol, and at the end he cried: "Give your yeasts enough sugar, and they will not stop working for three months, or even more!"

Then for a moment the searcher in him changed into a showman, an exhibitor of stupendous surprises, a missionary in the cause of microbes. The world must know and the people of the world must gasp at this astounding news that millions of gallons of wine in France and boundless oceans of beer in Germany are not made by men at all but by incessantly toiling armies of creatures ten-billion times smaller than a wee baby!

He read papers about this and gave speeches and threw his proofs insolently at the great Liebig's head—and in a little while a storm was up in the little Republic of Science on the left bank of the Seine in Paris. His old Professors beamed pride on him and the Academy of Sciences, which had refused to elect him a member, now gave him the Prize of Physiology, and the magnificent Claude Bernard—whom Frenchmen called Physiology itself—praised him in stately sentences. The next night, Dumas, his old professor—whose brilliant lectures had made him cry when he was a green boy in Paris—threw bouquets at Pasteur in a public speech that would have made another man than Pasteur bow his head and blush and protest. Pasteur did not blush—he was perfectly sure that Dumas was right. Instead he sat down proudly and wrote to his father:

"Mr. Dumas, after praising the so great penetration I had given proof of . . . added: 'The Academy, sir, rewarded you a few days ago for other profound researches; your audience