Liebig, the great German, the prince of chemists, the pope of chemistry, was opposed to his idea. “So Liebig says yeasts have nothing to do with the turning of sugar into alcohol--so he claims that you have to have albumen there, and that it is just the albumen breaking down that carries the sugar along down with it, into alcohol.” He would show this Liebig! Then a trick to beat Liebig flashed into his head, a crafty trick, a simple clear experiment that would smash Liebig and all other pooh-bahs of chemistry who scorned the important work that his precious microscopic creatures might do. “What I have to do is to grow yeasts in a soup that has no albumen in it at all. If yeasts will turn sugar into alcohol in such a soup--then Liebig and his theories are finished.” Defiance was in every fiber of him. This business was turning from an affair of cold science into a purely personal matter. But it was one thing to have this bright idea and quite another to find an albumenless food for yeasts--yeasts were squeamish in their tastes, confound them--and he fussed around his drafty attic and was for weeks an exasperated, a very grumpy Pasteur. Until one morning a happy accident cleared the road for him. He had by chance put some salt of ammonia into an albumen soup in which he grew the yeasts for his experiments. “What’s this,” he meditated. “The ammonia salt keeps disappearing as my yeasts bud and multiply. What does this mean?” He thought, he fumbled--“Wait! The yeasts use up the ammonia salt, they will grow without the albumen!” He slammed shut the door of his attic room, he must be alone while he worked--he loved to be alone as he worked just as he greatly enjoyed spouting his glorious results to worshipful, brilliant audiences. He took clean flasks and poured distilled water into them, and carefully weighed out pure sugar and slid it into this water, and then put in his ammonia salt--it was the tartrate of ammonia that he used. He reached for a bottle that swarmed with young budding yeasts; with care he fished out a yellowish flake of them and dropped it into his new albumenless soup. He put the bottle in his incubating oven. Would they grow? That night he turned over and over in his bed. He whispered his hopes and fears to Madame Pasteur--she couldn’t advise him but she comforted him. She understood everything but couldn’t explain away his worries. She was his perfect assistant.... He was back in his attic next morning not knowing how he had got up the stairs, not remembering his breakfast--he might have floated from his bed directly to the rickety dusty incubator that held his flask--that fatal flask. He opened the bottle and put a tiny cloudy drop from it between two thin bits of glass and slid the specimen under the lens of his microscope--and knew the world was his.