At once Pasteur told this new triumph to the Academy of Sciences--he had left off going to the Academy of Medicine after his brawl with Guérin--and he held out purple hopes to them that he would presently invent ingenious vaccines that would wipe out all diseases from mumps to malaria. “What is more easy,” he shouted, “than to find in these successive viruses a vaccine capable of making sheep and cows and horses a little sick with anthrax without letting them perish--and so preserving them from subsequent maladies?” Some of Pasteur’s colleagues thought he was a little cocksure about this, and they ventured to protest. Pasteur’s veins stood out on his forehead, but he managed to keep his mouth shut until he and Roux were on the way home, when he burst out, speaking really of all people who failed to see the absolute truth of his idea: “I would not be surprised if such a man were to be caught beating his wife!” Make no mistake--science was no cool collecting of facts for Pasteur; in him it set going the same kind of machinery that stirs the human animal to tears at the death of a baby and makes him sing when he hears his uncle has died and left him five hundred thousand dollars. But enemies were on Pasteur’s trail again. Just as he was always stepping on the toes of physicians, so he had offended the high and useful profession of the horse doctors, and one of the leading horse doctors, the editor of one of the most important journals of horse doctoring, his name was Doctor Rossignol, cooked up a plot to lure Pasteur into a dangerous public experiment and so destroy him. This Rossignol got up with a great show of scientific fairness at the Agricultural Society of Melun and said: “Pasteur claims that nothing is easier than to make a vaccine that will protect sheep and cows absolutely from anthrax. If that is true, it would be a great thing for French farmers, who are now losing twenty million francs a year from this disease. Well, if Pasteur can really make such magic stuff, he ought to be willing to prove to us that he has the goods. Let us get Pasteur to consent to a grand public experiment; if he is right, we farmers and veterinarians are the gainers--if it fails, Pasteur will have to stop his eternal blabbing about great discoveries that save sheep and worms and babies and hippopotamuses!” Like this argued the sly Rossignol. At once the Society raised a lot of francs to buy forty-eight sheep and two goats and several cows and the distinguished old Baron de la Rochette was sent to flatter Pasteur into this dangerous experiment. But Pasteur was not one bit suspicious. “Of course I am willing to demonstrate to your society that my vaccine is a life-saver--what will work in the laboratory on fourteen sheep will work on sixty at Melun!”