“Now I shall do the most remarkable experiment of all--I’ll prove to this ignorant Frémy that there are no yeasts inside of ripe grapes,” and he took a little hollow tube with a sharp point, sealed shut; it was a little tube he had heated very hot in an oven to kill all life--all yeasts--that might have been in it. Carefully he forced the sharp closed point of the tube through the skin into the middle of the grape; delicately he broke the sealed tip _inside_ the grape--and the little drop of juice that welled up into the tube he transferred with devilish cunning into another swan-necked flask part filled with grape juice. A few days later he cried, “That finishes Frémy--there is no fermentation in this flask at all--there is no yeast inside the grape!” He went on to one of those sweeping statements he loved to make: “Microbes never rise by themselves inside of grapes, or silkworms, or inside of healthy animals--in animal’s blood or urine. All microbes have to get in from the _outside_! That settles Frémy.” Then you can fancy him whispering to himself: “The world will soon learn the miracles that will grow from this little experiment.” VIII Surely it looked then as if Pasteur had a right to his fantastic dreams of wiping out disease. He had just received a worshiping letter from the English surgeon Lister--and this letter told of a scheme for cutting up sick people in safety, of doing operations in a way that kept out that deadly mysterious infection that in many hospitals killed eight people out of ten. “Permit me,” wrote Lister, “to thank you cordially for having shown me the truth of the theory of germs of putrefaction by your brilliant researches, and for having given me the single principle which has made the antiseptic system a success. If you ever come to Edinburgh it will be a real recompense to you, I believe, to see in our hospital in how large a measure humanity has profited from your work.” Like a boy who has just built a steam engine all by himself Pasteur was proud; he showed the letter to all his friends; he inserted it with all its praise in his scientific papers; he published it--of all places--in his book on beer! Then he took a final smash at poor old Frémy, who you would have thought was already sufficiently crushed by the gorgeous experiments; he smashed Frémy not by damning Frémy, but by praising himself! He spoke of his own “remarkable discoveries,” he called his own theories the true ones and ended: “In a word, the mark of true theories is their fruitfulness. This is the characteristic which Mr. Balard, with an entirely fatherly friendliness, has made stand out in speaking of my researches.” Frémy had no more to say.