Then at the next meeting Pasteur told the Academy of how he had quarantined his grape-vines against yeasts: “Is it not worthy of attention,” he shouted, “that in this vineyard of Arbois, and this would be true of millions of acres of vineyards all over the world, there was at the moment I made these experiments, not a speck of soil which was not capable of fermenting grapes into wine; and is it not remarkable that, on the contrary, the soil of my hothouses could not do this? And why? Because at a definite moment, I covered this soil with some glass....” Then he jumped to marvelous predictions, prophecies that have since his time come true, he leaped to poetry, I say, that makes you forget his vulgar wrangling with his dead friend Bernard. “Must we not believe, as well, that a day will come when preventive measures that are easy to apply, will arrest those plagues ...” and he painted them a lurid picture of the terrible yellow fever that just then had changed the gay streets of New Orleans into a desolation. He made them shiver to hear of the black plague on the far banks of the Volga. Finally he made them hope.... Meanwhile in a little village in Eastern Germany a young stubborn round-headed Prussian doctor was starting on his road to those very miracles that Pasteur was prophesying--this young doctor was doing strange experiments with mice in time stolen from his practice. He was devising ingenious ways to handle microbes so that he could be dead sure he was handling only one kind--he was learning to do a thing that Pasteur with all his brilliant skill had never succeeded in doing. Let us leave Pasteur for a while--even though he is on the threshold of his most exciting experiments and funniest arguments--let us leave him for a chapter and go with Robert Koch, while he is learning to do fantastic, and marvelously important things with those microbes which had been subjects of Pasteur’s kingdom for so many years. CHAPTER IV KOCH THE DEATH FIGHTER I In those astounding and exciting years between 1860 and 1870, when Pasteur was saving vinegar industries and astonishing emperors and finding out what ailed sick silkworms, a small, serious, and nearsighted German was learning to be a doctor at the University of Göttingen. His name was Robert Koch. He was a good student, but while he hacked at cadavers he dreamed of going tiger-hunting in the jungle. Conscientiously he memorized the names of several hundred bones and muscles, but the fancied moan of the whistles of steamers bound for the East chased this Greek and Latin jargon out of his head.