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edge of the drop was under his lens. . . . "But here at the edge they're not moving, they're lying round stiff as pokers." It was so with every specimen he looked at. "Air kills them," he cried, and was sure he had made a great discovery. A little while afterward he told the Academy proudly that he had not only discovered a new ferment, a wee animal that had a curious trick of making stale-butter-acid from sugar, but besides this he had discovered that these animals could live and play and move and do their work without any air whatever. Air even killed them! "And this," he cried, "is the first example of little animals living without air!"

Unfortunately it was the third example. Two hundred years before old Leeuwenhoek had seen the same thing. A hundred years later Spallanzani had been amazed to find that microscopic beasts could live without breathing.

Very probably Pasteur didn't know about these discoveries of the old trail blazers—I am sure he was not trying to steal their stuff—but as he went up in his excited climb toward glory and toward always increasing crowds of new discoveries, he regarded less and less what had been done before him and what went on around him. He re-discovered the curious fact that microbes make meat go bad. He failed to give the first discoverer, Schwann, proper credit for it!

But this strange neglect to give credit for the good work of others must not be posted too strongly against him in the Book of St. Peter, because you can see his fine imagination, that poet's thought of his, making its first attempts at showing that microbes are the real murderers of the human race. He dreams in this paper that just as there is putrid meat, so there are putrid diseases. He tells how he suffered in this work with meat gone bad; he tells about the bad smells—and how he hated bad smells!—that filled his little laboratory during these researches: "My researches on the fermentations have led me naturally toward these studies to which I have resolved to devote myself without too much thought of their danger or of the disgust which they inspire in me," and then he told the