Great Egyptian kings kept their names alive for posterity by having the court undertaker embalm them into expensive and gorgeous mummies. The Greeks and Romans had their likenesses wrought into dignified statues. Paintings exist of a hundred other distinguished men. What is left for us to see of the marvelous Spallanzani? In Pavia there is a modest little bust of him and in the museum near by, if you are interested, you may see--his bladder. What better epitaph could there be for Spallanzani? What relic could more perfectly suggest the whole of his passion to find truth, that passion which stopped at nothing, which despised conventions, which laughed at hardship, which ignored bad taste and the feeble pretty fitness of things? He knew his bladder was diseased. “Well, have it out after I’m dead,” you can hear him whisper as he lay dying. “Maybe you’ll find an astonishing new fact about diseased bladders.” That was the spirit of Spallanzani. This was the very soul of that cynical, sniffingly curious, coldly reasoning century of his--the century that discovered few practical things--but the same century that built the high clean house for Faraday and Pasteur, for Arrhenius and Emil Fischer and Ernest Rutherford to work in. CHAPTER III PASTEUR MICROBES ARE A MENACE! I In 1831, thirty-two years after the magnificent Spallanzani died, microbe hunting had come to a standstill once more. The sub-visible animals were despised and forgotten while other sciences were making great leaps ahead; clumsy horribly coughing locomotives were scaring the horses of Europe and America; the telegraph was getting ready to be invented. Marvelous microscopes were being devised, but no man had come to squint through these machines--no man had come to prove to the world that miserable little animals could do useful work which no complicated steam engine could attempt; there was no hint of the somber fact that these wretched microbes could kill their millions of human beings mysteriously and silently, that they were much more efficient murderers than the guillotine or the cannon of Waterloo. On a day in October in 1831, a nine-year-old boy ran frightened away from the edge of a crowd that blocked the door of the blacksmith shop of a village in the mountains of eastern France. Above the awed excited whispers of the people at the door this boy had heard the crackling “s-s-s-s-z” of a white hot iron on human flesh, and this terrifying sizzling had been followed by a groan of pain. The victim was the farmer Nicole. He had just been mangled by a mad wolf that charged howling, jaws dripping poison foam, through the streets of the village. The boy who ran away was Louis Pasteur, son of a tanner of Arbois and great-grandson of a serf of the Count of Udressier.