I don’t know what I replied; probably what he himself replied to his illustrious master: Then there is a silk-worm disease? There are provinces that are being ruined by it? All this was happening so far from Paris, and we were so far from Paris in the laboratory!... Pasteur hesitated. He was not a physiologist. But Dumas’ insistence, the attraction of the unknown, and an inward voice urged him to accept. So he left for the Midi; it was early in June 1865. He was invested with an official mission which confronted him with a plague that had to be conquered and obliged him to render an account of the attempts made and the results obtained. To be sent to fight a fire and not to know what fire is and to have no fire-engine or hose! It needed Pasteur to accept and to shoulder such a responsibility!... To his complaint that he had no knowledge of the matter, Dumas had replied: “So much the better! You will have no ideas on the subject but those that will come to you as a result of your own observations!” This reply is not always a paradox, but one has to be careful to whom one makes it! [70] In this case the choice was not mistaken, and the lesson was as profitable to Pasteur as it was to Fabre, to whom he was about to hand it on, all unsuspecting. When Pasteur was called upon to regenerate sericulture, the silk-worm disease had been known for twenty years. During that period much research had been undertaken and many efforts had been made, in France as well as in Italy, to discover the nature of the affection and to fight it. But “of all this story, a mixture of truth and falsehood, Pasteur knew nothing when he began his researches.” More—and this was what astonished Fabre—he knew nothing of the physiology or the rearing of the silk-worm. “For the first time he has seen a cocoon, and has learned that there is something in the cocoon, a rough model of the future moth,” ... and he is about to revolutionise the hygiene of the silk-worm nurseries and is preparing to revolutionise medicine and general hygiene in the same way, [71] by showing that the maladies of silk-worms and most of our human maladies arise from the development in the tissues of a microscopic living entity, a microbe, the cause of the malady. And while his other discoveries won for him only fame and the admiration of his contemporaries, this will give him immortality and place him in the front rank of the benefactors of humanity. Decidedly ignorance may have its advantages.