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this evening will applaud you as one of the most distinguished professors we possess.' All that I have underlined was said in these very words by Mr. Dumas, and was followed by great applause."

It is only natural that in the midst of this hurrahing there was some quiet hissing. Opponents began to rise on all sides. Pasteur made these enemies not entirely because his discoveries stepped on the toes of old theories and beliefs. No, his bristling curious impudent air of challenge got him enemies. He had a way of putting "am-I-not-clever-to-have-found-this-and-aren't-all-of-you-fools-not-to-believe-it-at-once" between the lines of all of his writings and speeches. He loved to fight with words, he had a cocky eagerness to get into an argument with every one about anything. He would have sputtered indignantly at an innocently intended comment on his grammar or his punctuation. Look at portraits of him taken at this time—it was 1860—read his researches, and you will find a fighting sureness of his perpetual rightness in every hair of his eyebrow and even in the technical terms and chemical formulas of his famous scientific papers.

Many people objected to this scornful cockiness—but some good men of science had better reasons for disagreeing with him—his experiments were brilliant, they were startling, but his experiments stopped short of being completely proved. They had loopholes. Every now and then when he set out confidently with some of his gray specks of ferment to make the acid of sour milk, he would find to his disgust a nasty smell of rancid butter wafting up from his bottles. There would be no little rods in the flask—alas—and none of the sour-milk-acid that he had set out to get. These occasional failures, the absence of sure-fire in these tests gave ammunition to his enemies and brought sleepless nights to Pasteur. But not for long! It is not the least strange thing about him that it didn't seem to matter to him that he never quite solved this confusing going wrong of his fermentations; he was a cunning man—instead of butting his head against the wall of