"Why not?" said they. "Coffee was discovered by a goat. A shepherd found by chance the waters of Luchon. It was also by accident that the ruins of Pompeii were brought to light by the pickaxe of a laborer. Why should we be so much surprised that this little girl, while amusing herself by digging in the ground during her hallucination, should have come upon a spring, and that the water of this spring should be mineral and alkaline? That she imagined at the moment that the Blessed Virgin was before her, and that she heard a voice directing her to the fountain, is merely a coincidence, entirely accidental, but of which superstition tries to make a miracle. On this occasion, as on the others, chance has done everything, and has been the real discoverer." The faithful were not, however, moved by this sort of argument. They had the bad taste to think that to explain everything by accidental coincidence was to do violence to reason under the pretext of defending it. This irritated the free-thinkers, who, though acknowledging at last the reality of the cures, deplored more than ever the religious and supernatural character which the common people insisted upon giving to these strange events; and, as was natural under the circumstances, they were inclined to resort to force to stop the popular movement. "If these waters are mineral," they began to say, "they belong to the state or to the municipality; people should not use them except by the advice of a doctor; and an establishment for baths should be built at the spot, not a chapel." The science of Lourdes, forced to assent to the facts in this case, had arrived at the state of mind just described when the measures of the prefect, relative to the objects deposited in the grotto, and the attempt to imprison Bernadette under the pretext of insanity, were announced--this attempt, as we have seen, having been defeated by the unexpected intervention of the curé, M. Peyramale. IV. A certain and official basis for all these theses of the desperate adherents of the medical theory was still a desideratum. M. Massy had already bethought himself of asking such a basis from one of the most wonderful and indubitable sciences of the age--namely, that of chemistry. With this view, he had applied, through the mayor of Lourdes, to a chemist of some distinction in the department--M. Latour de Trie. To show, not in detail by the examination of each special case, but once for all, that these cures which were rising up as formidable objections were naturally explained by the chemical constitution of the new spring, seemed to him a masterstroke; and he considered that, in accomplishing it, he would lay science and philosophy under obligation, not to mention also the administration, represented by the minister, M. Rouland.