“Here they are,” he cried, “lovely budding growing young yeasts, hundreds of thousands of them--yes, and here are some of the old ones, the parent yeasts I sowed in the bottle yesterday.” He wanted to rush out and tell some one, but he held himself--he must find out something more--he got some of the soup from the fatal bottle into a retort, to find out whether his budding beings had made alcohol. “Liebig is wrong--albumen isn’t necessary--it is yeasts, the growth of yeasts that ferments sugar.” And he watched trickling tears of alcohol run down the neck of the retort. He spent the next weeks in doing the experiment over and over, to be sure that the yeasts would keep on living, to be certain that they would keep on making alcohol. He transferred them monotonously, from one bottle to another--he put them through countless flasks of this same simple soup of ammonia salt and sugar in water and always the yeasts budded lustily and filled the bottles with a foamy collar of carbonic acid gas. Always they made alcohol! This checking-up of his discoveries was dull work. There was not the excitement, the sleepless waiting for a result he hoped for passionately or feared terribly would not come. His new fact was old stuff by now but still he kept on, he cared for his yeasts like some tender father, he fed them and loved them and was proud of their miraculous work of turning great quantities of sugar into alcohol. He ruined his health watching them and he violated sacred customs of all good middle-class Frenchmen. He writes of how he sat down before his lens at seven in the evening--and this is the dinner hour of France!--he sat down to watch and see if he could spy on his yeasts in the act of budding. “And from that time,” he writes, “I did not take my eye from the microscope.” It was half past nine before he was satisfied that he had seen them bud. He made vast crazy tests that lasted from June until September to find out how long yeasts would keep at their work of turning sugar into alcohol, and at the end he cried: “Give your yeasts enough sugar, and they will not stop working for three months, or even more!” Then for a moment the searcher in him changed into a showman, an exhibitor of stupendous surprises, a missionary in the cause of microbes. The world must know and the people of the world must gasp at this astounding news that millions of gallons of wine in France and boundless oceans of beer in Germany are not made by men at all but by incessantly toiling armies of creatures ten-billion times smaller than a wee baby!