At once Pasteur jumped to a fine idea: “If the harmless bugs from the air choke out the anthrax bacilli in the bottle, they will do it in the body too! It is a kind of dog-eat-dog!” shouted Pasteur, and at once he put Roux and Chamberland to work on the fantastic experiment of giving guinea-pigs anthrax and then shooting doses of billions of harmless microbes into them--beneficent germs which were to chase the anthrax bacilli round the body and devour them--they were to be like the mongoose which kills cobras.... Pasteur gravely announced: “That there were high hopes for the cure of disease from this experiment,” but that is the last you hear of it, for Pasteur was never a man to give the world of science the benefit of studying his failures. But a little later the Academy of Sciences sent him on a queer errand, and on this mission he stumbled across a fact that gave him the first clew to a genuine, a remarkable way of turning savage microbes into friendly ones. It was an outlandish plan he began to devise, to dream about, of turning living microbes of disease against their own kind, so guarding animals and men from invisible deaths. At this time there was a great to-do about a cure for anthrax, invented by the horse doctor, Louvrier, in the Jura mountains in the east of France. Louvrier had cured hundreds of cows who were at death’s door, said the influential men of the district: it was time that this treatment received scientific approval. II Pasteur arrived there, escorted by his young assistants, and found that this miraculous cure consisted first, in having several farm hands rub the sick cow violently to make her as hot as possible; then long gashes were cut in the poor beast’s skin and into these cuts Louvrier poured turpentine; finally the now bellowing and deplorably maltreated cow was covered--excepting her face!--with an inch thick layer of unmentionable stuff soaked in hot vinegar. This ointment was kept on the animal--who now doubtless wished she were dead--by a cloth that covered her entire body. Pasteur said to Louvrier: “Let us make an experiment. All cows attacked by anthrax do not die, some of them just get better by themselves; there is only one way to find out, Doctor Louvrier, whether or no it is your treatment that saves them.” So four good healthy cows were brought, and Pasteur in the presence of Louvrier and a solemn commission of farmers, shot a powerful dose of virulent anthrax microbes into the shoulder of each one of these beasts: this stuff would have surely killed a sheep, it was enough to do to death a few dozen guinea-pigs. The next day Pasteur and the commission and Louvrier returned, and all the cows had large feverish swellings on their shoulders, their breath came in snorts--they were in a bad way, that was very evident.