The world must know that microbes have got to have parents! At Paris he made a popular speech at the scientific soirée at the Sorbonne, before Alexandre Dumas, the novelist, and the woman genius, George Sand, the Princess Mathilde, and a hundred more smart people. That night he staged a scientific vaudeville that sent his audience home in awe and worry; he showed them lantern slides of a dozen different kinds of germs; mysteriously he darkened the hall and suddenly shot a single bright beam of light through the blackness. “Observe the thousands of dancing specks of dust in the path of this ray,” he cried; “the air of this hall is filled with these specks of dust, these thousands of little nothings that you should not despise always, for sometimes they carry disease and death; the typhus, the cholera, the yellow fever and many other pestilences!” This was dreadful news; his audience shuddered, convinced by his sincerity. Of course this news was not strictly true, but Pasteur was no mountebank--he believed it himself! Dust and the microbes of the dust had become his life--he was obsessed with dust. At dinner, even at the smartest houses, he would hold his plates and spoons close up to his nose, peer at them, scour them with his napkin, he was with a vengeance putting microbes on the map.... Every Frenchman from the Emperor down was becoming excited about Pasteur and his microbes. Whisperings of mysterious and marvelous events seeped through the gates of the Normal School. Students, even professors, passed the laboratory a little atremble with awe. One student might be heard remarking to another, as they passed the high gray walls of the Normal School in the Rue d’Ulm: “There is a man working here--his name is Pasteur--who is finding out wonderful things about the machinery of life, he knows even about the origin of life, he is even going to find out, perhaps, what causes disease....” So Pasteur succeeded in getting another year added to the course of scientific studies; new laboratories began to go up; his students shed tears of emotion at the fiery eloquence of his lectures. He talked about microbes causing disease long before he knew anything about whether or not they caused disease--he hadn’t yet got his fingers at the throats of mysterious plagues and dreadful deaths, but he knew there were other ways to interest the public, to arouse even such a hardheaded person as the average Frenchman. “I beg you,” he addressed the French people in a passionate pamphlet, “take some interest in those sacred dwellings meaningly called laboratories. Ask that they be multiplied and completed. They are the temples of the future, of riches and comfort.” Fifty years ahead of his time as a forward-looking prophet, he held fine austere ideals up to his countrymen while he appealed to their wishes for a somewhat piggish material happiness. A good microbe hunter, he was much more than a mere wool-gathering searcher, much more than a mere man of science....