He held the bottle up to the solitary gaslight that painted grotesque giant shadows of the apparatus on the laboratory walls. “Sure enough, there’s something changing here,” he whispered; “there are rows of little bubbles coming up from some of the gray specks I sowed in the bottle yesterday--there are many new gray specks--all of them are sprouting bubbles!” Then he became deaf and dumb and blind to the world of men; he stayed entranced before his little incubator; hours floated by, hours that might have been seconds for him. He took up his bottle caressingly; he shook it gently before the light--little spirals of gray murky cloud curled up from the bottom of the flask and from these spirals came big bubbles of gas. Now he would find out! He put a drop from the bottle before his microscope. Eureka! The field of the lens swarmed and vibrated with shimmying millions of the tiny rods. “They multiply! They are alive!” he whispered to himself, then shouted: “Yes, I’ll be up in a little while!” to Madame Pasteur who had called down begging him to come up for dinner, to come for a little rest. For hours he did not come. Time and again in the days that followed he did the same experiment, putting a tiny drop from a flask that swarmed with rods into a fresh clear flask of yeast soup that had none at all--and every time the rods appeared in billions and each time they made new quantities of the acid of sour milk. Then Pasteur burst out--he was not a patient man--to tell the world. He told Mr. Bigo it was the little rods that made his fermentations sick: “Keep the little rods out of your vats and you’ll always get alcohol, Mr. Bigo.” He told his classes about his great discovery that such infinitely tiny beasts could make acid of sour milk from sugar--a thing no mere man had ever done or could do. He wrote the news to his old Professor Dumas and to all his friends and he read papers about it to the Lille Scientific Society and sent a learned treatise to the Academy of Sciences in Paris. It is not clear whether Mr. Bigo found it possible to keep the little rods out of his vats--for they were like bad weeds that get into gardens. But to Pasteur that didn’t matter so much. Here was the one important fact: _It is living things, sub-visible living beings, that are the real cause of fermentations!_ Innocently he told every one that his discovery was remarkable--he was too much of a child to be modest--and from now on and for years these little ferments filled his sky; he ate and slept and dreamed and loved--after his absent-minded fashion--with his ferments by him. They were his life.