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B 943,752

1817

ARTE S

SCIENTIA

VERITAS

LIBRARY OF THE

UNIVE RSITY

OF MICHI

GAN

TEROR

SLOVARIS -PENINSULAM-AMCENAS

CIRCUMSPICE

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MICROBE HUNTERS

by

PAUL DE KRUIF

“The gods are frankly human, sharing in

the weaknesses of mankind, yet not un

touched with a halo of divine Romance. "

E. H. BLAKEMEY .

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BLUE RIBBON BOOKS

NEW YORK

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033

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COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY

FARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC .

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

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PRINTED BY THE CORNWALL PRESS, INC .

CORNWALL, N. Y.

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FRESHMAN COLLEGES FUND

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGT

I LEEUWENHOEK : First of the Microbe Hunters 3

II SPALLANZANI: Microbes Must Have Parents ! . • 25

III PASTEUR : Microbes Are a Menace ! . 57

IV KOCH : The Death Fighter 105

V PASTEUR : And the Mad Dog . 145

VI ROUX AND BEHRING: Massacre the Guinea - Pigs . 184

VII METCHNIKOFF : The Nice Phagocytes 207

VIII THEOBALD SMITH: Ticks and Texas Fever 234.

IX BRUCE : Trail of the Tsetse . 252

. 278X ROSS VS. GRASSI: Malaria .

- XI WALTER REED : In the Interest of Science and for

Humanity ! . . 311

XII PAUL EHRLICH : The Magic Bullet . . 334

INDEX 359

CHAPTER I

LEEUWENHOEK

FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS

I

Two hundred and fifty years ago an obscure man named

Leeuwenhoek looked for the first time into a mysterious new

world peopled with a thousand different kinds of tiny beings,

some ferocious and deadly, others friendly and useful, many

of them more important to mankind than any continent or

archipelago .

Leeuwenhoek, unsung and scarce remembered, is now almost

as unknown as his strange little animals and plants were at the

time he discovered them . This is the story of Leeuwenhoek,

the first of the microbe hunters. It is the tale of the bold and

persistent and curious explorers and fighters of death who came

after him. It is the plain history of their tireless peerings into

this new fantastic world . They have tried to chart it , these

microbe hunters and death fighters. So trying they have

groped and fumbled and made mistakes and roused vain hopes.

Some of them who were too bold have died - done to death by

the immensely small assassins they were studying — and these

have passed to an obscure small glory.

To - day it is respectable to be a man of science. Those who

go by the name of scientist form an important element of the

population, their laboratories are in every city, their achieve

ments are on the front pages of the newspapers, often before

they are fully achieved . Almost any young university student

can go in for research and by and by become a comfortable

science professor at a tidy little salary in a cozy college. But

4 LEEUWENHOEK

take yourself back to Leeuwenhoek's day, two hundred and

fifty years ago, and imagine yourself just through high school,

getting ready to choose a career, wanting to know

You have lately recovered from an attack of mumps, you

ask your father what is the cause of mumps and he tells you

a mumpish evil spirit has got into you. His theory may not

impress you much , but you decide to make believe you believe

him and not to wonder any more about what is mumps - be

cause if you publicly don't believe him you are in for a beating

and may even be turned out of the house. Your father is

Authority.

That was the world three hundred years ago, when Leeuwen

hoek was born . It had hardly begun to shake itself free from

superstitions, it was barely beginning to blush for its ignorance.

It was a world where science (which only means trying to find

truth by careful observation and clear thinking) was just

learning to toddle on vague and wobbly legs . It was a world

where Servetus was burned to death for daring to cut up and

examine the body of a dead man , where Galileo was shut up for

life for daring to prove that the earth moved around the sun.

Antony Leeuwenhoek was born in 1632 amid the blue wind

mills and low streets and high canals of Delft, in Holland. His

family were burghers of an intensely respectable kind and I

say intensely respectable because they were basket -makers and

brewers, and brewers are respectable and highly honored in

Holland. Leeuwenhoek's father died early and his mother

sent him to school to learn to be a government official, but he

left school at sixteen to be an apprentice in a dry -goods store

in Amsterdam. That was his university. Think of a present

day scientist getting his training for experiment among bolts of

gingham , listening to the tinkle of the bell on the cash drawer,

being polite to an eternal succession of Dutch housewives who

shopped with a penny - pinching dreadful exhaustiveness — but

that was Leeuwenhoek's university, for six years !

At the age of twenty -one he left the dry - goods store, went

back to Delft, married, set up a dry -goods store of his own

FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 5

there. For twenty years after that very little is known about

him , except that he had two wives ( in succession ) and several

children most of whom died, but there is no doubt that during

this time he was appointed janitor of the city hall of Delft, and

that he developed a most idiotic love for grinding lenses . He

had heard that if you very carefully ground very little lenses

out of clear glass , you would see things look much bigger than

they appeared to the naked eye. ... Little is known about

him from twenty to forty , but there is no doubt that he passed

in those days for an ignorant man. The only language he knew

was Dutch — that was an obscure language despised by the cul

tured world as a tongue of fishermen and shop-keepers and

diggers of ditches. Educated men talked Latin in those days,

but Leeuwenhoek could not so much as read it and his only

literature was the Dutch Bible. Just the same, you will see

that his ignorance was a great help to him, for, cut off from all

of the learned nonsense of his time, he had to trust to his own

eyes , his own thoughts, his own judgment. And that was easy

for him because there never was a more mulish man than this

Antony Leeuwenhoek !

It would be great fun to look through a lens and see things

bigger than your naked eye showed them to you! But buy

lenses ? Not Leeuwenhoek ! There never was a more sus

picious man. Buy lenses ? He would make them himself !

During these twenty years of his obscurity he went to spec

tacle-makers and got the rudiments of lens-grinding. He

visited alchemists and apothecaries and put his nose into their

secret ways of getting metals from ores , he began fumblingly

to learn the craft of the gold- and silversmiths. He was a most

pernickety man and was not satisfied with grinding lenses as

good as those of the best lens-grinder in Holland, they had to

be better than the best, and then he still fussed over them for

long hours. Next he mounted these lenses in little oblongs of

copper or silver or gold, which he had extracted himself, over

hot fires, among strange smells and fumes. To-day searcbers

pay seventy -five dollars for a fine shining microscope, turn the

6 LEEUWENHOEK

)

screws, peer through it, make discoveries — without knowing

anything about how it is built. But Leeuwenhoek

Of course his neighbors thought he was a bit cracked but

Leeuwenhoek went on burning and blistering his hands. Work

ing forgetful of his family and regardless of his friends , he

bent solitary to subtle tasks in still nights. The good neighbors

sniggered, while that man found a way to make a tiny lens , less

than one -eighth of an inch across, so symmetrical, so perfect,

that it showed little things to him with a fantastic clear enor

mousness. Yes, he was a very uncultured man, but he alone

of all men in Holland knew how to make those lenses, and he

said of those neighbors : "We must forgive them , seeing that

they know no better."

Now this self - satisfied dry -goods dealer began to turn his

lenses onto everything he could get hold of . He looked

through them at the muscle fibers of a whale and the scales of

his own skin . He went to the butcher shop and begged or

bought ox -eyes and was amazed at how prettily the crystalline

lens of the eye of the ox is put together. He peered for hours

at the build of the hairs of a sheep, of a beaver, of an elk, that

were transformed from their fineness into great rough logs

under his bit of glass . He delicately dissected the head of a

fly ; he stuck its brain on the fine needle of his microscope

how he admired the clear details of the marvelous big brain of

that fly ! He examined the cross-sections of the wood of a

dozen different trees and squinted at the seeds of plants . He

grunted " Impossible !” when he first spied the outlandish large

perfection of the sting of a flea and the legs of a louse . That

man Leeuwenhoek was like a puppy who sniffs — with a totally

impolite disregard of discrimination — at every object of the

world around him!

!

II

There never was a less sure man than Leeuwenhoek . He

looked at this bee's sting or that louse's leg again and again

FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 7

a

and again . He left his specimens sticking on the point of his

strange microscope for months — in order to look at other

things he made more microscopes till he had hundreds of them !

—then he came back to those first specimens to correct his first

mistakes. He never set down a word about anything he peeped

at, he never made a drawing until hundreds of peeps showed

him that, under given conditions, he would always see exactly

the same thing. And then he was not sure ! He said :

“People who look for the first time through a microscope

say now I see this and then I see that — and even a skilled ob

server can be fooled . On these observations I have spent more

time than many will believe, but I have done them with joy,

and I have taken no notice of those who have said why take

so much trouble and what good is it ? —but I do not write for

such people but only for the philosophicall” He worked for

twenty years that way, without an audience.

But at this time, in the middle of the seventeenth century,

great things were astir in the world. Here and there in France

and England and Italy rare men were thumbing their noses at

almost everything that passed for knowledge. “We will no

longer take Aristotle's say - so , nor the Pope's say-so ,” said these

rebels. “We will trust only the perpetually repeated observa

tions of our own eyes and the careful weighings of our scales ;

we will listen to the answers experiments give us and no other

answers!” So in England a few of these revolutionists started

a society called The Invisible College , it had to be invisible be

cause that man Cromwell might have hung them for plotters

and heretics if he had heard of the strange questions they were

trying to settle. What experiments those solemn searchers

made! Put a spider in a circle made of the powder of a uni

corn's horn and that spider can't crawl out — so said the wis

dom of that day. But these Invisible Collegians ? One of

them brought what was supposed to be powdered unicorn's

horn and another came carrying a little spider in a bottle . The

college crowded around under the light of high candles. Si

8 LEEUWENHOEK

lence, then the hushed experiment, and here is their report of

it :

" A circle was made with the powder of unicorn's horn and a

spider set in the middle of it , but it immediately ran out. ”

Crude, you exclaim. Of course ! But remember that one of

the members of this college was Robert Boyle, founder of the

science of chemistry , and another was Isaac Newton. Such

was the Invisible College, and presently, when Charles II came

to the throne , it rose from its depths as a sort of blind-pig

scientific society to the dignity of the name of the Royal So

ciety of England. And they were Antony Leeuwenhoek's first

audience ! There was one man in Delft who did not laugh at

Antony Leeuwenhoek, and that was Regnier de Graaf, whom

the Lords and Gentlemen of the Royal Society had made a cor

responding member because he had written them of interesting

things he had found in the human ovary . Already Leeuwen

hoek was rather surly and suspected everybody, but he let de

Graaf peep through those magic eyes of his, those little lenses

whose equal did not exist in Europe or England or the whole

world for that matter. What de Graaf saw through those

microscopes made him ashamed of his own fame and he hur

ried to write to the Royal Society :

"Get Antony Leeuwenhoek to write you telling of his dis

coveries. "

And Leeuwenhoek answered the request of the Royal So

ciety with all the confidence of an ignorant man who fails to

realize the profound wisdom of the philosophers he addresses.

It was a long letter, it rambled over every subject under the

sun , it was written with a comical artlessness in the conversa

tional Dutch that was the only language he knew . The title of

that letter was : " A Specimen of some Observations made by a

Microscope contrived by Mr. Leeuwenhoek, concerning Mould

upon the Skin , Flesh, etc.; the Sting of a Bee , etc.” The Royal

Society was amazed, the sophisticated and learned gentlemen

were amused — but principally the Royal Society was astounded

by the marvelous things Leeuwenhoek told them he could see

FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 9

through his new lenses. The Secretary of the Royal Society

thanked Leeuwenhoek and told him he hoped his first com

munication would be followed by others. It was, by hundreds

of others over a period of fifty years. They were talkative let

ters full of salty remarks about his ignorant neighbors, of ex

posures of charlatans and of skilled explodings of superstitions,

of chatter about his personal health — but sandwiched between

paragraphs and pages of this homely stuff, in almost every let

ter, those Lords and Gentlemen of the Royal Society had the

honor of reading immortal and gloriously accurate descriptions

of the discoveries made by the magic eye of that janitor and

shopkeeper. What discoveries!

When you look back at them , many of the fundamental dis

coveries of science seem so simple, too absurdly simple. How

was it men groped and fumbled for so many thousands of years

without seeing things that lay right under their noses ? So

with microbes. Now all the world has seen them cavorting on

movie screens, many people of little learning have peeped at

them swimming about under lenses of microscopes, the green

est medical student is able to show you the germs of I don't

know how many diseases - what was so hard about seeing

microbes for the first time ?

But let us drop our sneers to remember that when Leeuwen

hoek was born there were no microscopes but only crude hand

lenses that would hardly make a ten-cent piece look as large as

a quarter. Through these — without his incessant grinding of

his own marvelous lenses — that Dutchman might have looked

till he grew old without discovering any creature smaller than a

cheese -mite. You have read that he made better and better

lenses with the fanatical persistence of a lunatic ; that he ex

amined everything, the most intimate things and the most

shocking things, with the silly curiosity of a puppy. Yes, and

all this squinting at bee -stings and mustache hairs and what

not were needful to prepare him for that sudden day when he

looked through his toy of a gold -mounted lens at a fraction of

a small drop of clear rain water to discover

10 LEEUWENHOEK

.

What he saw that day starts this history. Leeuwenhoek was

a maniac observer, and who but such a strange man would have

thought to turn his lens on clear, pure water, just come down

from the sky ? What could there be in water but just - water ?

You can imagine his daughter Maria — she was nineteen and

she took such care of her slightly insane father !—watching him

take a little tube of glass, heat it red-hot in a flame, draw it out

to the thinness of a hair. Maria was devoted to her father

-let any of those stupid neighbors dare to snigger at him !-

but what in the world was he up to now, with that hair - fine

glass pipe?

You can see her watch that absent-minded wide-eyed man

break the tube into little pieces, go out into the garden to bend

over an earthen pot kept there to measure the fall of the rain.

He bends over that pot. He goes back into his study. He

sticks the little glass pipe onto the needle of his micro

scope. ...

What can that dear silly father be up to?

He squints through his lens . He mutters guttural words

under his breath . ...

Then suddenly the excited voice of Leeuwenhoek : "Come

here! Hurry! There are little animals in this rain water . ...

They swim ! They play around ! They are a thousand times

smaller than any creatures we can see with our eyes alone. .

Look ! See what I have discovered ! ”

Leeuwenhoek's day of days had come. Alexander had gone

to India and discovered huge elephants that no Greek had ever

seen before — but those elephants were as commonplace to

Hindus as horses were to Alexander . Cæsar had gone to Eng.

land and come upon savages that opened his eyes with wonder

-but these Britons were as ordinary to each other as Roman

centurions were to Cæsar. Balboa ? What were his proud

feelings as he looked for the first time at the Pacific ? Just the

same that Ocean was as ordinary to a Central American Indian

as the Mediterranean was to Balboa. But Leeuwenhoek ? This

FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS II

a

janitor of Delft had stolen upon and peeped into a fantastic

sub-visible world of little things, creatures that had lived , had

bred , had battled, had died, completely hidden from and un

known to all men from the beginning of time . Beasts these

were of a kind that ravaged and annihilated whole races of men

ten million times larger than they were themselves. Beings

these were, more terrible than fire-spitting dragons or hydra

headed monsters. They were silent assassins that murdered

babes in warm cradles and kings in sheltered places. It was

this invisible, insignificant, but implacable and sometimes

friendly — world that Leeuwenhoek had looked into for the first

time of all men of all countries .

This was Leeuwenhoek's day of days. .

III

That man was so unashamed of his admirations and his sur

prises at a nature full of startling events and impossible things.

How I wish I could take myself back, could bring you back, to

that innocent time when men were just beginning to disbelieve

in miracles and only starting to find still more miraculous facts.

How marvelous it would be to step into that simple Dutch

man's shoes, to be inside his brain and body, to feel his ex

citement — it is almost nauseal - at his first peep at those ca

vorting "wretched beasties.”

That was what he called them , and, as I have told you, this

Leeuwenhoek was an unsure man . Those animals were too

tremendously small to be true, they were too strange to be

true. So he looked again , till his hands were cramped with

holding his microscope and his eyes full of that smarting water

that comes from too -long looking. But he was right ! Here

they were again , not one kind of little creature, but here was

another, larger than the first, " moving about very nimbly be

cause they were furnished with divers incredibly thin feet.”

Wait! Here is a third kind — and a fourth, so tiny I can't

1 2

LEEUWENHOEK

>

make out his shape. But he is alive! He goes about, dashing

over great distances in this world of his water -drop in the little

tube. What nimble creatures !

“ They stop, they stand still as ' twere upon a point, and then

turn themselves round with that swiftness, as we see a top turn

round, the circumference they make being no bigger than that

of a fine grain of sand. ” So wrote Leeuwenhoek .

For all this seemingly impractical sniffing about, Leeuwen

hoek was a hard -headed man . He hardly ever spun theories,

he was a fiend for measuring things. Only how could you make

a measuring stick for anything so small as these little beasts ?

He wrinkled his low forehead : "How large really is this last

and smallest of the little beasts? ” He poked about in the cob

webbed corners of his memory among the thousand other things

he had studied with you can't imagine what thoroughness; he

made calculations: “ This last kind of animal is a thousand

times smaller than the eye of a large louse!” That was an

accurate man . For we know now that the eye of one full

grown louse is no larger nor smaller than the eyes of ten thou

sand of his brother and sister lice.

But where did these outlandish little inhabitants of the rain

water come from ? Had they come down from the sky ? Had

they crawled invisibly over the side of the pot from the ground ?

Or had they been created out of nothing by a God full of

whims ? Leeuwenhoek believed in God as piously as any Seven

teenth Century Dutchman . He always referred to God as the

Maker of the Great All. He not only believed in God but he

admired him intensely — what a Being to know how to fashion

bees' wings so prettily ! But then Leeuwenhoek was a material

ist too. His good sense told him that life comes from life. His

simple belief told him that God had invented all living things

in six days, and, having set the machinery going, sat back to

reward good observers and punish guessers and bluffers. He

stopped speculating about improbable gentle rains of little

animals from heaven. Certainly God couldn't brew those ani

mals in the rain water pot out of nothing! But wait

1

FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 13

Maybe ? Well, there was only one way to find out where they

came from. " I will experiment ! ” he muttered.

He washed out a wine glass very clean, he dried it, he held

it under the spout of his eaves -trough, he took a wee drop in

one of his hair - fine tubes. Under his lens it went. ... Yes!

They were there, a few of those beasts, swimming about.

“ They are present even in very fresh rain water !” But then,

that really proved nothing, they might live in the eaves-trough

and be washed down by the water . ...

Then he took a big porcelain dish, " glazed blue within ,” he

washed it clean , out into the rain he went with it and put it

on top of a big box so that the falling raindrops would splash

no mud into the dish . The first water he threw out to clean

it still more thoroughly . Then intently he collected the next

bit in one of his slender pipes, into his study he went with

it. ...

“ I have proved it ! This water has not a single little creature

in it ! They do not come down from the sky !”

But he kept that water ; hour after hour, day after day he

squinted at it — and on the fourth day he saw those wee beasts

beginning to appear in the water along with bits of dust and

little flecks of thread and lint. That was a man from Missouri!

Imagine a world of men who would submit all of their cock

sure judgments to the ordeal of the common -sense experiments

of a Leeuwenhoek !

Did he write to the Royal Society to tell them of this en

tirely unsuspected world of life he had discovered ? Not yet !

He was a slow man . He turned his lens onto all kinds of

water, water kept in the close air of his study, water in a pot

kept on the high roof of his house, water from the not-too

clean canals of Delft and water from the deep cold well in his

garden . Everywhere he found those beasts. He gaped at

their enormous littleness, he found many thousands of them

did not equal a grain of sand in bigness, he compared them to

a cheese -mite and they were to this filthy little creature as a

bee is to a horse. He was never tired with watching them

14 LEEUWENHOEK

" swim about among one another gently like a swarm of mos

quitoes in the air. ..."

Of course this man was a groper. He was a groper and a

stumbler as all men are gropers, devoid of prescience, and

stumblers , finding what they never set out to find. His new

beasties were marvelous but they were not enough for him, he

was always poking into everything, trying to see more closely ,

trying to find reasons. Why is the sharp taste of pepper ?

That was what he asked himself one day, and he guessed :

“There must be little points on the particles of pepper and

these points jab the tongue when you eat pepper.

But are there such little points ?

He fussed with dry pepper. He sneezed. He sweat, but

he couldn't get the grains of pepper small enough to put under

his lens . So, to soften it, he put it to soak for several weeks

in water. Then with fine needles he pried the almost invisible

specks of the pepper apart, and sucked them up in a little drop

of water into one of his hair - fine glass tubes. He looked

Here was something to make even this determined man

scatter -brained. He forgot about possible small sharp points

on the pepper . With the interest of an intent little boy he

watched the antics of "an incredible number of little animals,

of various sorts , which move very prettily , which tumble about

and sidewise, this way and that !”

So it was Leeuwenhoek stumbled on a magnificent way to

grow his new little animals.

And now to write all this to the great men off there in Lon

don ! Artlessly he described his own astonishment to them .

Long page after page in a superbly neat handwriting with little

common words he told them that you could put a million of

these little animals into a coarse grain of sand and that one

drop of his pepper-water, where they grew and multiplied so

well , held more than two -million seven -hundred -thousand of

them. ...

This letter was translated into English. It was read before

FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 15

the learned skeptics — who no longer believed in the magic

virtues of unicorn's horns — and it bowled the learned body

over ! What!What! The Dutchman said he had discovered beasts

so small that you could put as many of them into one little

drop of water as there were people in his native country ?

Nonsense ! The cheese mite was absolutely and without doubt

the smallest creature God had created.

But a few of the members did not scoff. This Leeuwenhoek

was a confoundedly accurate man : everything he had ever

written to them they had found to be true. ... So a letter

went back to the scientific janitor, begging him to write them

in detail the way he had made his microscope, and his method

of observing.

That upset Leeuwenhoek . It didn't matter that these stupid

oafs of Delft laughed at him — but the Royal Society? He

had thought they were philosophers ! Should he write them

details, or should be from now on keep everything he did to

himself ? “ Great God, ” you can imagine him muttering,

" these ways I have of uncovering mysterious things, how I

have worked and sweat to learn to do them , what jeering from

how many fools haven't I endured to perfect my microscopes

and my ways of looking!

But creators must have audiences. He knew that these

doubters of the Royal Society should have sweat just as hard

to disprove the existence of his little animals as he himself had

toiled to discover them . He was hurt, but - creators must have

an audience. So he replied to them in a long letter assuring

them he never told anything too big. He explained his cal

culations (and modern microbe hunters with all of their ap

paratus make only slightly more accurate ones ! ) he wrote these

calculations out, divisions, multiplications, additions, until his

letter looked like a child's exercise in arithmetic . He finished

by saying that many people of Delft had seen - with applause!

-these strange new animals under his lens . He would send

them affidavits from prominent citizens of Delft-two men of

16 LEEUWENHOEK

God, one notary public, and eight other persons worthy to be

believed . But he wouldn't tell them how he made his micro

scopes .

That was a suspicious man ! He held his little machines up

for people to look through, but let them so much as touch the

microscope to help themselves to see better and he might or

der them out of his house . He was like a child anxious

and proud to show a large red apple to his playmates but loth

to let them touch it for fear they might take a bite out of it.

So the Royal Society commissioned Robert Hooke and Ne

hemiah Grew to build the very best microscopes, and brew

pepper water from the finest quality of black pepper. And, on

the 15th of November, 1677 , Hooke came carrying his micro

scope to the meeting - agog - for Antony Leeuwenhoek had

not lied . Here they were, those enchanted beasts ! The mem

bers rose from their seats and crowded round the microscope.

They peered, they exclaimed : this man must be a wizard ob

server ! That was a proud day for Leeuwenhoek. And a little

later the Royal Society made him a Fellow , sending him a

gorgeous diploma of membership in a silver case with the coata

of arms of the society on the cover . " I will serve you faith

fully during the rest of my life , ” he wrote them. And he was

as good as his word, for he mailed them those conversational

mixtures of gossip and science till he died at the age of ninety.

But send them a microscope ? Very sorry , but that was im

possible to do, while he lived. The Royal Society went so far

as to dispatch Doctor Molyneux to make a report on this

janitor-discoverer of the invisible. Molyneux offered Leeu

wenhoek a fine price for one of his microscopes — surely he

could spare one ?—for there were hundreds of them in cabinets

that lined his study. But no ! Was there anything the gentle

man of the Royal Society would like to see ? Here were some

most curious little unborn oysters in a bottle , here were divers

very nimble little animals, and that Dutchman held up his

lenses for the Englishman to peep through, watching all the

while out of the corner of his eye to see that the undoubtedly

>

FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 17

most honest visitor didn't touch anything - or filch any

thing.

“But your instruments are marvelous ! ” cried Molyneux.

“A thousand times more clear they show things than any lens

we have in England ! ”

"How I wish, Sir, " said Leeuwenhoek, “ that I could show

you my best lens, with my special way of observing, but I

keep that only for myself and do not show it to any one - not

even to my own family .”

IV

Those little animals were everywhere! He told the Royal

Society of finding swarms of those sub -visible beings in his

mouth - of all places : “ Although I am now fifty years old , ”

he wrote, “ I have uncommonly well -preserved teeth , because

it is my custom every morning to rub my teeth very hard with

salt, and after cleaning my large teeth with a quill , to rub

them vigorously with a cloth . ..." But there still were little

bits of white stuff between his teeth , when he looked at them

with a magnifying mirror. ...

What was this white stuff made of ?

From his teeth he scraped a bit of this stuff, mixed it with

pure rain water, stuck it in a little tube on to the needle of hisa

microscope, closed the door of his study ,

What was this that rose

from the gray dimness of

his lens into clear distinct

ness as he brought the tube

into the focus ? Here was

an unbelievably tiny crea

ture, leaping about in the

water of the tube "like the

fish called a pike.” There

was a second kind that swam forward a little way, then whirled

about suddenly, then tumbled over itself in pretty somer

9

30

18 LEEUWENHOEK

saults. There were some beings that moved sluggishly and

looked like wee bent sticks, nothing more, but that Dutchman

squinted at them till his eyes were red -rimmed — and they

moved , they were alive, no doubt of it ! There was a me

nagerie in his mouth ! There were creatures shaped like flex

ible rods that went to and fro with the stately carriage of

bishops in procession, there were spirals that whirled through

the water like violently animated corkscrews.

Everybody he could get hold of - as well as himself — was an

experimental animal for that curious man . Tired from his

long peering at the little beasts in his own mouth, he went for

a walk under the tall trees that dropped their yellow leaves on

the brown mirrors of the canals; it was hard work, this play of

his, he must rest ! But he met an old man, a most interesting

old man : “ I was talking to this old man ,” wrote Leeuwen

hoek to the Royal Society, " an old man who led a very sober

life, who never used brandy nor tobacco and very seldom wine,

and my eye chanced to fall on his teeth which were badly

grown over and that made me ask him when he had last

cleaned his mouth. I got for answer that he had never cleaned

his teeth in his whole life. ..."

Away went all thought of his aching eyes. What a zoo of

wee animals must be in this old fellow's mouth. He dragged

the dirty but virtuous victim of his curiosity into his study ,

of course there were millions of wee beasties in that mouth,

but what he wanted particularly to tell the Royal Society was

this: that this old man's mouth was host to a new kind of

creature, that slid along among the others, bending its body

in graceful bows like a snake — the water in the narrow tube

seemed to be alive with those little fellows!

You may wonder that Leeuwenhoek nowhere in any of those

hundreds of letters makes any mention of the harm these

mysterious new little animals might do to men. He had come

upon them in drinking water, spied upon them in the mouth ;

as the years went by he discovered them in the intestines of

frogs and horses, and even in his own discharges; in swarms

.

FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 19

he found them on those rare occasions when , as he says, "he,

was troubled with a looseness.” But not for a moment did he

guess that his trouble was caused by those little beasts, and

from his unimaginativeness and his carefulness not to jump

to conclusions modern microbe hunters — if they only had time

to study his writings — could learn a great deal. For, during

the last fifty years, literally thousands of microbes have been

described as the authors of hundreds of diseases, when, in the

majority of cases those germs have only been chance residents

in the body at the time it became diseased. Leeuwenhoek was

cautious about calling anything the cause of anything else . He

had a sound instinct about the infinite complicatedness of

everything — that told him the danger of trying to pick out one

cause from the tangled maze of causes which control life. . .

The years went by. He tended his little dry -goods store, he

saw to it the city hall of Delft was properly swept out, he grew

more and more crusty and suspicious, he looked longer and

longer hours through his hundreds of microscopes, he made

a hundred amazing discoveries. In the tail of a little fish stuck

head first into a glass tube he saw for the first time of all men

the capillary blood vessels through which blood goes from the

arteries to the veins-- so he completed the Englishman Har

vey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. The most

sacred and improper and romantic things in life were only

material for the probing, tireless eyes of his lenses. Leeuwen

hoek discovered the human sperm, and the cold - blooded sci

ence of his searching would have been shocking, if he had not

been such a completely innocent man ! The years went by

and all Europe knew about him. Peter the Great of Russia

came to pay his respects to him, and the Queen of England

journeyed to Delft only to look at the wonders to be seen

through the lenses of his microscopes. He exploded countless

superstitions for the Royal Society, and aside from Isaac New

ton and Robert Boyle he was the most famous of their mem

bers. But did these honors turn his head ? They couldn't

turn his head because he had from the first a sufficiently high

20 LEEUWENHOEK

a

opinion of himself! His arrogance was limitless — but it was

equaled by his humility when he thought of that misty un

known that he knew surrounded himself and all men . He

admired the Dutch God but his real god was truth :

“ My determination is not to remain stubbornly with my

ideas but I'll leave them and go over to others as soon as I am

shown plausible reasons which I can grasp . This is the more

true since I have no other purpose than to place truth before

my eyes so far as it is in my power to embrace it ; and to use

the little talent I have received to draw the world away from its

old heathenish superstitions and to go over to the truth and to

stick to it .”

He was an amazingly healthy man , and at the age of eighty

his hand hardly trembled as he held up his microscope for

visitors to peep at his little animals or to exclaim at the un

born oysters . But he was fond of drinking in the evenings

as what Dutchman is not ? —and his only ill seems to have

been a certain seediness in the morning after such wassail. He

detested physicians — how could they know about the ills of

the body when they didn't know one thousandth of what he

did about the build of the body ? So Leeuwenhoek had his

own theories — and sufficiently foolish they were about the

cause of this seediness. He knew that his blood was full of

little globules — he had been the first of all men to see them .

He knew those globules had to go through very tiny capillaries

to get from his arteries to his veins - hadn't he been the man

to discover those wee vessels in a fish tail ? Well, after those

hilarious nights of his, his blood got too thick to run properly

from the arteries to the veins! So he would thin it ! So he

wrote to the Royal Society :

“When I have supped too heavily of an evening, I drink in

the morning a large number of cups of coffee, and that as hot

as I can drink it, so that the sweat breaks out on me, and if by

so doing I can't restore my body, a whole apothecary's shop

couldn't do much, and that is the only thing I have done for

years when I have felt a fever."

FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 21

That hot coffee drinking led him to another curious fact

about the little animals. Everything he did led him to pry

up some new fact of nature, for he lived wrapped in those tiny

dramas that went on under his lenses just as a child listens

open -mouthed with saucer eyes to the myths of Mother

Goose. . . . He never tired of reading the same story of na

ture, there were always new angles to be found in it , the pages

of his book of nature were thumbed and dog - eared by his in

satiable interest. Years after his discovery of the microbes

in his mouth one morning in the midst of his sweating from

his vast curative coffee drinkings he looked once more at the

stuff between his teeth

What was this ? There was not a single little animal to be

found. Or there were no living animals rather, for he thought

he could make out the bodies of myriads of dead ones — and

maybe one or two that moved feebly , as if they were sick.

" Blessed Saints !” he growled: “ I hope some great Lord of the

Royal Society doesn't try to find those creatures in his mouth,

and fail, and then deny my observations. ..."

But look here ! He had been drinking coffee, so hot it had

blistered his lips, almost. He had looked for the little animals

in the white stuff from between his front teeth . It was just

after the coffee he had looked there - Well ?

With the help of a magnifying mirror he went at his back

teeth . Presto !! “With great surprise I saw an incredibly

large number of little animals, and in such an unbelievable

quantity of the aforementioned stuff, that it is not to be con

ceived of by those who have not seen it with their own eyes. "

Then he made delicate experiment in tubes, heating the water

with its tiny population to a temperature a little warmer than

that of a hot bath . In a moment the creatures stopped their

agile runnings to and fro . He cooled the water. They did

not come back to life - so ! It was that hot coffee that had

killed the beasties in his front teeth !

With what delight he watched them once more ! But he

was bothered, he was troubled , for he couldn't make out the

22 LEEUWENHOEK

heads or tails of any of his little animals. After wiggling for

ward in one direction they stopped , they reversed themselves

and swam backward just as swiftly without having turned

around. But they must have heads and tails ! They must

have livers and brains and blood vessels as well ! His thoughts

floated back to his work of forty years before, when he had

found that under his powerful lenses fleas and cheese mites,

so crude and simple to the naked eye, had become as compli

cated and as perfect as human beings. But try as he would,

with the best lenses he had , and those little animals in his

mouth were just plain sticks of spheres or corkscrews. So

he contented himself by calculating, for the Royal So

ciety, what the diameter of the invisible blood vessels of his

microbes must be — but mind you, he never for a moment

hinted that he had seen such blood vessels ; it only amused him

to stagger his patrons by speculations of their unthinkable

smallness,

If Antony Leeuwenhoek failed to see the germs that cause

human disease, if he had too little imagination to predict the

rôle of assassin for his wretched creatures, he did show that

sub -visible beasts could devour and kill living beings much

larger than they were themselves. He was fussing with mus

sels, shellfish that he dredged up out of the canals of Delft .

He found thousands of them unborn inside their mothers. He

tried to make these young ones develop outside their mothers

in a glass of canal water. " I wonder, ” he muttered, “ why our

canals are not choked with mussels, when the mothers have

each one so many young ones inside them ! ” Day after day

he poked about in his glass of water with its slimy mass of

embryos, he turned his lens on to them to see if they were grow

ing — but what was this ? Astounded he watched the fishy stuff

disappear from between their shells — it was being gobbled up

by thousands of tiny microbes that were attacking the mussels

greedily . ..

“ Life lives on life — it is cruel, but it is God's will , ” he pon

dered. " And it is for our good, of course, because if there

FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS 23

weren't little animals to eat up the young mussels, our canals

would be choked by those shellfish , for each mother has more

than a thousand young ones at a time! ” So Antony Leeuwen

hoek accepted everything and praised everything, and in this

he was a child of his time, for in his century searchers had not

yet, like Pasteur who came after them, begun to challenge

God, to shake their fists at the meaningless cruelties of nature

toward mankind, her children . ...

He passed eighty, and his teeth came loose as they had to

even in his strong body; he didn't complain at the inexorable

arrival of the winter of his life, but he jerked out that old

tooth and turned his lens onto the little creatures he found

within that hollow root — why shouldn't he study them once

more? There might be some little detail he had missed those

hundred other times ! Friends came to him at eighty -five and

told him to take it easy and leave his studies. He wrinkled his

brow and opened wide his still bright eyes: “ The fruits that

ripen in autumn last the longest !” he told them - he called

eighty - five the autumn of his life !

Leeuwenhoek was a showman. He was very pleased to

hear the ohs and ahs of people they must be philosophical

people and lovers of science, mind you !—whom he let peep

into his sub-visible world or to whom he wrote his disjointed

marvelous letters of description . But he was no teacher.

" I've never taught one, ” he wrote to the famous philosopher

Leibniz, “ because if I taught one, I'd have to teach others. . ,

I would give myself over to a slavery , whereas I want to stay

a free man.”

“ But the art of grinding fine lenses and making observa

tions of these new creatures will disappear from the earth, if

you don't teach young men ,” answered Leibniz.

“ The professors and students of the University of Leyden

were long ago dazzled by my discoveries , they hired three lens

grinders to come to teach the students, but what came of it ? ”

wrote that independent Dutchman.

" Nothing, so far as I can judge, for almost all of the courses

24 LEEUWENHOEK

a

.

they teach there are for the purpose of getting money through

knowledge or for gaining the respect of the world by showing

people how learned you are, and these things have nothing to

do with discovering the things that are buried from our eyes.

I am convinced that of a thousand people not one is capable of

carrying out such studies, because endless time is needed and

much money is spilled and because a man has always to be

busy with his thoughts if anything is to be accomplished . . .

That was the first of the microbe hunters. In 1723 , when

he was ninety -one years old and on hisdeathbed, he sent for

his friend Hoogvliet. He could not lift his hand. His once

glowing eyeswere rheumy and their lids were beginning to

stick fast with the cement of death . He mumbled :

"Hoogvliet, my friend, be so good as to have those two

letters on the table translated into Latin . ... Send them to

London to the Royal Society . ..."

So he kept his promise made fifty years before, and Hoog

vliet wrote, along with those last letters : " I send you , learned

sirs , this last gift of my dying friend, hoping that his final

word will be agreeable to you .”

So he passed, this first of the microbe hunters. You will

read of Spallanzani, who was much more brilliant, of Pasteur

who had a thousand times his imagination , of Robert Koch

who did much more immediate apparent good in lifting the

torments that microbes bring to men — these and all the others

have much more fame to -day . But not one of them has been

so completely honest, so appallingly accurate as this Dutch

janitor, and all of them could take lessons from his splendid

common sense .

CHAPTER II

SPALLANZANI

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS !

I

" LEEUWENHOEK is dead , it is too bad, it is a loss that cannot

be made good. Who now will carry on the study of the little

animals ?” asked the learned men of the Royal Society in Eng

land, asked Réaumur and the brilliant Academy in Paris.

Their question did not wait long for an answer, for the janitor

of Delft had hardly closed his eyes in 1723 for the long sleep

that he had earned so well, when another microbe hunter was

born , in 1729 a thousand miles away in Scandiano in northern

Italy. This follower of Leeuwenhoek was Lazzaro Spallan

zani, a strange boy who lisped verses while he fashioned mud

pies; who forgot mudpies to do fumbling childish and cruel

experiments with beetles and bugs and flies and worms. In

stead of pestering his parents with questions, he examined

living things in nature, by pulling legs and wings off them , by

trying to stick them back on again. He must find out how

things worked ; he didn't care so very much what they looked

like.

Like Leeuwenhoek , the young Italian had to fight to be

come a microbe hunter against the wishes of his family. His

father was a lawyer and did his best to get Lazzaro interested

in long sheets of legal foolscap — but the youngster sneaked

away and skipped flat stones over the surface of the water, and

wondered why the stones skipped and didn't sink.

In the evenings he was made to sit down before dull lessons,

but when his father's back was turned he looked out of the

25

26 SPALLANZANI

window at the stars that gleamed in the velvet black Italian

sky , and next morning lectured about them to his playmates

until they called him " The Astrologer."

On holidays he pushed his burly body through the woods

Dear Scandiano, and came wide-eyed upon foaming natural

fountains. These made him stop his romping, and caused him

to go home sunk in unboyish thought. What caused these

fountains ? His folks and the priest had told him they had

sprung in olden times from the tears of sad, deserted, beautiful

girls who were lost in the woods. ...

Lazzaro was a dutiful son — and a politician of a son — so he

didn't argue with his father or the priest . But to himself he

said “ bunk ” to their explanation , and made up his mind to find

out, some day, the real why and wherefore of fountains.

Young Spallanzani was just as determined as Leeuwenhoek

had been to find out the hidden things of nature, but he set

about getting to be a scientist in an entirely different way . He

pondered : “My father insists that I study law, does he ? " He

kept up the pretense of being interested in legal documents

but in every spare moment he boned away at mathematics

and Greek and French and Logic — and during his vacations

watched skipping stones and fountains, and dreamed about

understanding the violent fireworks of volcanoes. Then craft

ily he went to the noted scientist, Vallisnieri, and told this

great man what he knew. “ But you were born for a scientist,”

said Vallisnieri, “ you waste time foolishly, studying lawbooks.”

" Ah, master, but my father insists.”

Indignantly Vallisnieri went to Spallanzani senior and

scolded him for throwing away Lazzaro's talents on the merely

useful study of law . " Your boy," he said, " is going to be a

searcher, he will honor Scandiano, and make it famous — he is

like Galileo ! ”

And the shrewd young Spallanzani went to the University at

Reggio , with his father's blessing, to take up the career of

scientist.

At this time it was much more respectable and safe to be a

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 27

scientist than it had been when Leeuwenhoek began his first

grinding of lenses. The Grand Inquisition was beginning to

pull in its horns. It preferred jerking out the tongues of ob

scure alleged criminals and burning the bodies of unknown

heretics , to persecuting Servetuses and Galileos. The Invisible

College no longer met in cellars or darkened rooms, and learned

societies all over were now given the generous support of

parliaments and kings. It was not only beginning to be per

mitted to question superstitions, it was becoming fashionable

to do it . The thrill and dignity of real research into nature

began to elbow its way into secluded studies of philosophers.

Voltaire retired for years into the wilds of rural France to

master the great discoveries of Newton, and then to popularize

them in his country. Science even penetrated into brilliant

and witty and immoral drawing-rooms, and society leaders like

Madame de Pompadour bent their heads over the forbidden

Encyclopedia — to try to understand the art and science of the

making of rouge and silk stockings.

Along with this excited interest in everything from the me

chanics of the stars to the caperings of little animals, the

people of Spallanzani's glittering century began to show an

open contempt for religion and dogmas, even the most sacred

A hundred years before men had risked their skins to

laugh at the preposterous and impossible animals that Aris

• totle had gravely put into his books on biology . But now, they

could openly snicker at the mention of his name and whisper:

" Because he's Aristotle it implies that he must be believed

e'en though he lies." Still there was plenty of ignorance in

the world , and much pseudo-science even in the Royal So

cieties and Academies. And Spallanzani, freed from the horror

of an endless future of legal wranglings, threw himself with

vigor into getting all kinds of knowledge, into testing all kinds

of theories, into disrespecting all kinds of authorities no matter

how famous, into association with every kind of person , from

fat bishops, officials, and professors to outlandish actors and

minstrels.

28 SPALLANZANI

He was the very opposite of Leeuwenhoek, who so patiently

had ground lenses, and looked at everything for twenty years

before the learned world knew anything about him. At twenty

five Spallanzani made translations of the ancient poets, and

criticized the standard and much admired Italian translation

of Homer. He brilliantly studied mathematics with his cousin ,

Laura Bassi, the famous woman professor of Reggio . He now

skipped stones over the water in earnest, and wrote a scientific

paper on the mechanics of skipping stones. He became a

priest of the Catholic Church, and helped support himself by

saying masses.

Despising secretly all authority, he got himself snugly into

the good graces of powerful authorities, so that he might work

undisturbed . Ordained a priest, supposed to be a blind fol

lower of the faith , he fell savagely to questioning everything,

to taking nothing for granted - excepting the existence of God,

of some sort of supreme being. At least if he questioned this

he kept it - rogue that he was strictly to himself. Before he

was thirty years old he had been made professor at the Univer

sity of Reggio, talking before enthusiastic classes that listened

to him with saucer -eyes. Here he started his first work on

the little animals, those weird new little beings that Leeuwen

hoek had discovered . He began his experiments on them as

they were threatening to return to that misty unknown from

which the Dutchman had dredged them up.

The little animals had got themselves involved in a strange

question, in a furious fight, and had it not been for that, they

might have remained curiosities for centuries, or even have

been completely forgotten . This argument, over which dear

friends grew to hate each other and about which professors

tried to crack the skulls of priests, was briefly this : Can living

things arise spontaneously, or does every living thing have to

have parents? Did God create every plant and animal in the

first six days, and then settle down to be Managing Director

of the universe, or does He even now amuse Himself by allow

ing new animals to spring up in humorous ways ?

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 29

In Spallanzani's time the popular side was the party that as

serted that life could arise spontaneously. The great majority

of sensible people believed that many animals did not have to

have parents — that they might be the unhappy illegitimate

children of a disgusting variety of dirty messes. Here, for

example, was a supposedly sure recipe for getting yourself a

good swarm of bees. Take a young bullock, kill him with a

knock on the head, bury him under the ground in a standing

position with his horns sticking out. Leave him there for a

month, then saw off his horns — and out will fly your swarm of

bees.

.

II

Even the scientists were on this side of the question. The

English naturalist Ross announced learnedly that: “ To' ques

tion that beetles and wasps were generated in cow dung is to

question reason, sense , and experience.” Even such compli

cated animals as mice didn't have to have mothers or fathers

-if anybody doubted this, let him go to Egypt, and there

he would find the fields literally swarming with mice, begot

of the mud of the River Nile — to the great calamity of the in

habitants !

Spallanzani heard all of these stories which so many im

portant people were sure were facts , he read many more of

them that were still more strange, he watched students get into

brawls in excited attempts to prove that mice and bees didn't

have to have fathers or mothers. He heard all of these things

-and didn't believe them . He was prejudiced . Great ad

vances in science so often start from prejudice, on ideas got

not from science but straight out of a scientist's head, on no

tions that are only the opposite of the prevailing superstitious

nonsense of the day. Spallanzani had violent notions about

whether life could rise spontaneously; for him it was on the

face of things absurd to think that animals — even the wee

beasts of Leeuwenhoek could arise in a haphazard way from

30 SPALLA NZANI

any old thing or out of any dirty mess. There must be law

and order to their birth , there must be a rime and reason !

But how to prove it ?

Then one night, in his solitude, he came across a little book ,

a simple and innocent little book, and this book told him of

an entirely new way to tackle the question of how life arises.

The fellow who wrote the book didn't argue with words — he

just made experiments — and God ! thought Spallanzani, how

clear are the facts he demonstrates. He stopped being sleepy

and forgot the dawn was coming, and read on. ...

The book told him of the superstition about the generation

of maggots and flies, it told of how even the most intelligent

men believed that maggots and flies could arise out of putrid

meat. Then—and Spallanzani's eyes nearly popped out with

wonder, with excitement, as he read of a little experiment that

blew up this nonsense, once and for always.

“ A great man, this fellow Redi, who wrote this book , "

thought Spallanzani, as he took off his coat and bent his thick

neck toward the light of the candle. "See how easy he settles

it ! He takes two jars and puts some meat in each one. He

leaves one jar open and then puts a light veil over the other

one. He watches — and sees flies go down into the meat in the

open pot — and in a little while there are maggots there, and

then new flies. He looks at the jar that has the veil over it

and there are no maggots or flies in that one at all . How

easy ! It is just a matter of the veil keeping the mother flies

from getting at the meat. But how clever, because for a

thousand years people have been getting out of breath arguing

about the question — and not one of them thought of doing this

simple experiment that settles it in a moment. "

Next morning it was one jump from the inspiring book to

tackling this same question , not with flies, but with the micro

scopic animals. For all the professors were saying just then

that though maybe flies had to come from eggs, little sub-visi

ble animals certainly could rise by themselves.

Spallanzani began fumblingly to learn how to grow wee

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 31

.

beasts, and how to use a microscope. He cut his hands and

broke large expensive flasks. He forgot to clean his lenses

and sometimes saw his little animals dimly through his fogged

glasses — just as you can faintly make out minnows in the water

riled up by your net. He raved at his blunders ; he was not

the dogged worker that Leeuwenhoek had been — but despite

his impetuousness he was persistent — he must prove that these

yarns about the animalcules were yarns, nothing more . But

wait ! " If I set out to prove something I am no real scientist

-I have to learn to follow where the facts leadme I have to

learn to whip my prejudices. ..." And he kept on learning

to study little animals, and to observe with a patient, if not

an unprejudiced eye, and gradually he taught the vanity of his

ideas to bow to the hard clearness of his facts.

At this time another priest, named Needham , a devout Cath

olic who liked to think he could do experiments, was becoming

notorious in England and Ireland, claiming that little micro

scopic animals were generated marvelously in mutton gravy .

Needham sent his experiments to the Royal Society , and the

learned Fellows deigned to be impressed.

He told them how he had taken a quantity of mutton gravy

hot from the fire, and put the gravy in a bottle, and plugged

the bottle up tight with a cork , so that no little animals or their

eggs could possibly get into the gravy from the air. Next he

even went so far as to heat the bottle and its mutton gravy in

hot ashes. " Surely,” said the good Needham , “ this will kill

any little animals or their eggs, that might remain in the flask . ”

He put this gravy flask away for a few days, then pulled the

cork — and marvel of marvels — when he examined the stuff

inside with his lens, he found it swarming with animalcules.

“ A momentous discovery, this,” cried Needham to the Royal

Society, " these little animals can only have come from the

juice of the gravy . Here is a real experiment showing that life

can come spontaneously from dead stuff ! ” He told them

mutton -gravy wasn't necessary — a soup made from seeds or

almonds would do the same trick,

2

32 SPALLANZANI

The Royal Society and the whole educated world were ex

cited by Needham's discovery. Here was no Old Wives' tale .

Here was hard experimental fact; and the heads of the Society

got together and thought about making Needham a Fellow of

their remote aristocracy of learning. But away in Italy, Spal

lanzani was reading the news of Needham's startling creation

of little animals from mutton gravy . While he read he knit

his brows, and narrowed his dark eyes . At last he snorted :

"Animalcules do not arise by themselves from mutton gravy ,

or almond seeds, or anything else ! This fine experiment is

a fraud - maybe Needham doesn't know it is — but there's a

nigger in thewood pile somewhere. I'm going to find it. ..."

The devil of prejudice was talking again. Now Spallanzani

began to sharpen his razors for his fellow priest — the Italian

was a nasty fellow who liked to slaughter ideas of any kind

that were contrary to his — he began to whet his knives, I say ,

for Needham . Then one night, alone in his laboratory , away

from the brilliant clamor of his lectures and remote from the

gay salons where ladies adored his knowledge, he felt sure he

had found the loophole in Needham's experiment. He chewed

his quill , he ran his hands through his shaggy hair, “ Why have

those little animals appeared in that hot gravy, and in those

soups made from seeds? ” Undoubtedly because Needham

didn't heat the bottles long enough, and surely because he

didn't plug them tight enough!

Here the searcher in him came forward - he didn't go to his

desk to write Needham about it - instead he went to his dusty

glass -strewn laboratory , and grabbed some flasks and seeds,

and dusted off his microscope. He started out to test, even

to defeat, if necessary, his own explanations. Needham didn't

heat his soups long enough — maybe there are little animals,

or their eggs, which can stand a tremendous heat, who knows ?

So Spallanzani took some large glass flasks, round bellied with

tapering necks. He scrubbed and washed and dried them till

they stood in gleamirg rows on his table. Then he put seeds

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 33

of various kinds into some, and peas and almonds into others,

and following that poured pure water into all of them . " Now I

won't only heat these soups for a short time, ” he cried , “ but

I'll boil them for an hour ! ” He got his fires ready — then he

grunted: “But how shall I close up my flasks ? Corks might

not be tight enough , they might let these infinitely wee things

through .” He pondered . “ I've got it, I'll melt the necks of"

my bottles shut in a flame. I'll close them with glass — nothing,

no matter how small, can sneak through glass!”

So he took his shining flasks one by one, and rolled their

necks gently in a hot flame till each one was fused completely

shut. He dropped some of them when they got too hot - he

sizzled the skin of his fingers, he swore, and got new flasks to

take the smashed ones ' places . Then when his flasks were all

sealed and ready, "Now for some real heat, " he muttered, and

for tedious hours he tended his bottles, as they bumped and

danced in caldrons of boiling water. One set he boiled for a

few minutes only. Another he kept in boiling water for a full

hour.

At last, his eyes near stuck shut with tiredness, he lifted the

flasks of stew steaming from their kettles, and put them care

fully away — to wait for nervous anxious days to see whether

any little animals would grow in them . And he did another

thing, a simple one which I almost forgot to tell you about, he

made another duplicate set of stews in flasks plugged up with

corks, not sealed, and after boiling these for an hour put them

away beside the others.

Then he went off for days to do the thousand things that

were not enough to use up his buzzing energy . He wrote letters

to the famous naturalist Bonnet, in Switzerland, telling him his

experiments; he played football; he went hunting and fishing.

He lectured about science, and told his students not of dry

technicalities only , but of a hundred things — from the mar

velous wee beasts that Leeuwenhoek had found in his mouth

to the strange eunuchs and the veiled multitudinous wives of

а .

34 SPALLANZANI

Turkish harems. At last he vanished and students and pro

fessors — and ladies — asked : “ Where is the Abbé Spallanzani? ”

He had gone back to his rows of flasks of seed soup .

III

He went to the row of sealed flasks first, and one by one he

cracked open their necks, and fished down with a slender

hollow tube to get some of the soup inside them , in order to

see whether any little animals at all had grown in these bottles

that he had heated so long, and closed so perfectly against the

microscopic creatures that might be floating in the dust of the

outside air. He was not the lively sparkling Spallanzani now.

He was slow, he was calm. Like some automaton, some

slightly animated wooden man he put one drop of seed -soup

after another before his lens.

He first looked at drop after drop of the soup from the

sealed flasks which had been boiled for an hour, and his long

looking was rewarded by — nothing. Eagerly he turned to the

bottles that had been boiled for only a few minutes, and

cracked their seals as before, and put drops of the soup inside

them before his lens.

“ What's this ? ” he cried. Here and there in the gray field

of his lens he made out an animalcule playing and sporting

about - these weren't large microbes, like some he had seen

but they were living little animals just the same.

“Why, they look like little fishes, tiny as ants,” he muttered

-and then something dawned on him- " These flasks

were sealed — nothing could get into them from the outside,

yet here are little beings that have stood a heat of boiling water

for several minutes !”

He went with nervous hands to the long row of flasks he

had only stoppered with corks — as his enemy Needham had

done—and he pulled out the corks , one by one, and fished in

the bottles once more with his tubes. He growled excitedly,

he got up from his chair, he seized a battered notebook and

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 33

feverishly wrote down obscure remarks in a kind of scrawled

shorthand . But these words meant that every one of the

flasks which had been only corked, not sealed, was alive with

little animals ! Even the corked flasks which had been boiled

for an hour, " were like lakes in which swim fishes of all sizes,

from whales to minnows."

“ That means the little animals get into Needham's flasks

from the air ! ” he shouted . "And besides I have discovered a

great new fact : living things exist that can stand boiling water

and still live — you have to heat them to boiling almost an hour

to kill them ! ”

It was a great day for Spallanzani, and though he did not

know it , a great day for the world. Spallanzani had proved

that Needham's theory of little animals arising spontaneously

was wrong - just as the old master Redi had proved the idea

was wrong that flies can be bred in putrid meat. But he had

done more than that, for he had rescued the baby science of

microbe hunting from a fantastic myth , a Mother Goose yarn

that would have made all scientists of other kinds hold their

noses at the very mention of microbe hunting as a sound branch

of knowledge.

Excited , Spallanzani called his brother Nicolo, and his sister,

and told them his pretty experiment. And then, bright-eyed ,

he told his students that life only comes from life ; every liv

ing thing has to have a parent - even these wretched little ani

mals! Seal your soup flasks in a flame, and nothing can get

into them from outside. Heat them long enough, and every

thing, even those tough beasts that can stand boiling, will be

killed . Do that, and you'll never find any living animals aris

ing in any kind of soup — you could keep it till doomsday.

Then he threw his work at Needham's head in a brilliant sar

castic paper, and the world of science was thrown into an up

roar . Could Needham really be wrong? asked thoughtful

men , gathered in groups under the high lamps and candles of

the scientific societies of London and Copenhagen, of Paris and

Berlin .

36 SPA LLA

NZA NI

The argument between Spallanzani and Needham didn't stay

in the academies among the highbrows. It leaked out through

heavy doors onto the streets and crept into stylish drawing

rooms. The world would have liked to believe Needham , for

the people of the eighteenth century were cynical and gay ;

everywhere men were laughing at religion and denying any

supreme power in nature, and they delighted in the notion that

life could arise haphazardly . But Spallanzani's experiments

were so clear and so hard to answer, even with the cleverest

words. ...

Meanwhile the good Needham had not been resting on his

oars exactly ; he was an expert at publicity, and to help his

cause along he went to Paris and lectured about his mutton

gravy , and in Paris he fell in with the famous Count Buffon .

This count was rich ; he was handsome ; he loved to write

about science; he believed he could make up hard facts in his

head; he was rather too well dressed to do experiments . Be

sides he really knew some mathematics, and had translated

Newton into French . When you consider that he could juggle

most complicated figures, that he was a rich nobleman as well,

you will agree that he certainly ought to know — without ex

perimenting — whether little animals could come to life with

out fathers or mothers ! So argued the godless wits of Paris.

Needham and Buffon got on famously. Buffon wore purple

clothes and lace cuffs that he didn't like to muss up on dirty

laboratory tables, with their dust and cluttered glassware and

pools of soup spilled from accidentally broken flasks. So he

did the thinking and writing, while Needham messed with the

experiments. These two men then set about to invent a great

theory of how life arises, a fine philosophy that every one

could understand, that would suit devout Christians as well as

witty atheists. The theory ignored Spallanzani's cold facts,

but what would you have ? It came from the brain of the

great Buffon, and that was enough to upset any fact, no matter

how hard, no matter how exactly recorded .

" What is it that causes these little animals to arise in mutton

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 37

gravy , even after it has been heated , my Lord ? ” you can hear

Needham asking of the noble count. Count Buffon's brain

whirled in a magnificent storm of the imagination, then he

answered : “ You have made a great, a most momentous dis

covery , Father Needham . You have put your finger on the

very source of life. Inyour mutton gravy you have uncovered

the very force — it must be a force, everything is force — which

creates life ! ”

“Let us then call it the Vegetative Force, my Lord, ” replied

Father Needham .

"An apt name,” said Buffon , and he retired to his perfumed

study and put on his best suit and wrote - not from dry

laboratory notes or the exact records of lenses or flasks but

from his brain - he wrote, I say, about the marvels of this

Vegetative Force that could make little animals out of mutton

gravy and heated seed soups. In a little while Vegetative

Force was on everybody's tongue. It accounted for everything.

The wits made it take the place of God, and the churchmen

said it was God's most powerful weapon. It was popular like

a street song or an off color story - or like present day talk

about relativity.

Worst of all, the Royal Society tumbled over itself to get

ahead of the men in the street, and elected Needham a Fellow , a

and the Academy of Sciences of Paris made him an Associate .

Meanwhile in Italy Spallanzani began to walk up and down his

laboratory and sputter and rage. Here was a danger to

science, here was ignoring of cold facts, without which science

is nothing. Spallanzani was a priest of God, and God was per

haps reasonably sacred to him, he didn't argue with any one

about that — but here was a pair of fellows who ignored his

pretty experiments, his clear beautiful facts !

But what could Spallanzani do ? Needham and Buffon had

deluged the scientific world with words — they had not an

swered his facts, they had not shown where Spallanzani's ex

periment of the sealed flasks was wrong. The Italian was a

fighter, but he liked to fight with facts and experiments, and>

38 S PAL

LAN ZAN

I

here he was laying about him in this fog of big words, and

hitting nothing. Spallanzani stormed and laughed and was

sarcastic and bitter about this marvelous hoax, this mysterious

Vegetative Force. It was the Force, prattled Needham , that

had made Eve grow out of Adam's rib . It was the Force, once

more, that gave rise to the remarkable worm-tree of China,

which is a worm in winter, and then marvelous to say is turned

by the Vegetative Force into a tree in summer ! And much

more of such preposterous stuff, until Spallanzani saw the

whole science of living things in danger of being upset, by this

alleged Vegetative Force with which, next thing people knew ,

Needham would be turning cows into men and fleas into ele

phants.

Then suddenly Spallanzani had his chance, for Needham

made an objection to one of his experiments. “Your experi

ment does not hold water,” he wrote to the Italian, " because

you have heated your flasks for an hour, and that fierce heat

weakens and so damages the Vegetative Force that it can no

longer make little animals.”

This was just what the energetic Spallanzani was waiting

for, and he forgot religion and large classes of eager students

and the pretty ladies that loved to be shown through his

museum. He rolled up his wide sleeves and plunged into

work, not at a writing desk but before his laboratory bench,

not with a pen , but with his flasks and seeds and microscopes.

IV

“ So Needham says heat damages the Force in the seeds,

does he? Has he tried it ? How can he see or feel or weigh

or measure this Vegetative Force ? He says it is in the seeds,

well , we'll heat the seeds and see !”

Spallanzani got out his flasks once more and cleaned them.

He brewed mixtures of different kinds of seeds, of peas and

beans and vetches with pure water, until his work room almost

ran over with flasks — they perched on high shelves, they sat

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 39

on tables and chairs, they cluttered the floor so it was hard to

walk around.

" Now , we'll boil a whole series of these flasks different

lengths of time, and see which one generates the most little

animals,” he said, and then doused one set of his soups in boil

ing water for a few minutes, another for a half hour, another

for an hour, and still another for two hours. Instead of seal

ing them in the flame he plugged them all up with corks

Needham said that was enough — and then he put them care

fully away to see what would happen . He waited . He went

off fishing and forgot to pull up his rod when a fish bit , he

collected minerals for his museum, and forgot to take them

home with him . He plotted for higher pay, he said masses, and

studied the copulation of frogs and toads — and then disap

peared once more to his dim work room with its regiments of

bottles and weird machines . He waited .

If Needham were right, the flasks boiled for minutes should

be alive with little animals, but the ones boiled for an hour

or two hours should be deserted . He pulled out the corks one

by one, and looked at the drops of soup through his lens and

at last laughed with delight — the bottles that had been boiled

for two hours actually had more little animals sporting about

in them than the ones he had heated for a few minutes.

" Vegetative Force, what nonsense ! so long as you only plug

up your flasks with corks the little animals will get in from

the air . You can heat your soups till you're black in the face

-the microbes will get in just the same and grow , after the

broth has cooled .”

Spallanzani was triumphant, but then he did the curious

thing that only born scientists ever dohe tried to beat his

own idea, his darling theory - by experiments he honestly and

shrewdly planned to defeat himself. That is science ! That

is the strange self-forgetting spirit of a few rare men, those

curious men to whom truth is more dear than their own cher

ished whims and wishes. Spallanzani walked up and down

his narrow work room, hands behind him, meditating— “Wait,

40 SPALLANZAN I

maybe after all Needham has guessed right, maybe there is

some mysterious force in these seeds that strong heat might

destroy."

Then he cleaned his flasks again , and took some seeds, but

instead of merely boiling them in water, he put them in a

coffee -roaster and baked them till they were soot- colored

cinders. Next he poured pure distilled water over them , growl

ing : “ Now if there was a Vegetative Force in those seeds, I

have surely roasted it to death . "

Days later when he came back to his flasks, with their soups

brewed from the burned seeds, he smiled a sarcastic smile - a

smile that meant squirmings for Buffon and Needham - for

as one bottle after another yielded its drops of soup to his lens,

every drop from every bottle was alive with wee animals that

swam up and down in the liquid and went to and fro , living

their funny limited little lives as gayly as any animals in the

best soup made from unburned seeds. He had tried to defeat

his own theory, and so trying had licked the pious Needham

and the precious Buffon . They had said that heat would kill

their Force so that no little animals could arise — and here were

seeds charred to carbon, furnishing excellent food for the small

creatures — this so -called Force was a myth ! Spallanzani pro

claimed this to all of Europe, which now began to listen to

him .

Then he relaxed from his hard pryings into the loves and

battles and deaths of little animals by making deep studies of

the digestion of food in the human stomach - and to do this

he experimented cruelly on himself. This was not enough, so

he had to launch into weird investigations in the hot dark at

tic of his house, on the strange problem of how bats can keep

from bumping into things although they cannot see . In the

midst of this he found time to help educate his little nephews

and to take care of his brother and sister, obscure beings who

did not share his genius — but they were of his blood, and he

loved them .

But he soon came back to the mysterious question of how

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 41

life arises, that question which his religion taught him to ig

nore, to accept with blind faith as a miracle of the Creator. He

didn't work with little animals only ; instead he turned his

curiosity onto larger ones, and began vast researches on the

mating of toads. “ What is the cause of the violent and per

sistent way in which the male toad holds the female ?” he

asked himself, and his wonder at this strange event set his

ingenious brain to devising experiments of an unheard -of bar

barity.

He didn't do them out of any fiendish whim to hurt the

father toad — but this man must know every fact that could

possibly be known about how new toads arose. What will

make the toad let go this grip ? And that mad priest cut off

a male toad's hind legs in the midst of its copulation — but the

dying animal did not relax that blind grasp to which nature

drove it. Spallanzani mused over his bizarre experiment.

“ This persistence of the toad,” he said, “ is due less to his

obtuseness of feeling than to the vehemence of his passion."

In his sniffing search for knowledge which let him stop at

nothing, he was led by an instinct that drove him into heart

less experiments on animals — but it made him do equally cruel

and fantastic tests on himself. He studied the digestion of

food in the stomach , he gulped down hollowed-out blocks of

wood with meat inside them, then tickled his throat and made

himself vomit them up again so that he could find out what

had happened to the meat inside the blocks. He kept insanely

at this self-torture, until, as he admitted at last , a horrid

nausea made him stop the experiments.

Spallanzani held immense correspondences with half the

doubters and searchers of Europe. By mail he was a great

friend of that imp, Voltaire . He complained that there were

few men of talent in Italy, the air was too humid and foggy

he became a leader of that impudent band of scientists and

philosophers who unknowingly prepared the bloodiest of rev

olutions while they tried so honestly to find truth and estab

lish happiness and justice in the world. These men believed

42 SPALLANZANI

that Spallanzani had spiked once for all that nonsense about

animals — even the tiniest ones — arising spontaneously. Led

by Voltaire they cracked vast jokes about the Vegetative Force

and its parents, the pompous Buffon and his laboratory boy,

Father Needham .

“ But there is a Vegetative Force, " cried Needham , " a mys

terious something — I'll admit you can't see it or weigh it — that

can make life arise out of gravy or soup or out of nothing at

all, perhaps. Maybe it can stand all of that roasting that

Spallanzani applies to it , but what it needs particularly is a

very elastic air to help it . And when Spallanzani boils his

flasks for an hour, he hurts the elasticity of the air inside the

flasks ! ”

Spallanzani was up in arms in a moment, and bawled for

Needham's experiments . " Has he heated air to see if it got less

elastic ? " The Italian waited for experiments — and got only

words. “ Then I'll have to test it out myself, ” he said, and

once again he put seeds in rows of flasks and sealed off their

necks in a fiame— and boiled them for an hour. Then one

morning he went to his laboratory , and cracked off the neck

of one of his bottles. ..

He cocked his ear - he heard a little wh -i- S -S -S - S - t. " What's

this,” he muttered, and grabbed another bottle and cracked

off its neck, holding his ear close by. Wh - i- s - s - st ! There it

was again. “ That means the air is coming out of my bottle,

or going into it,” he cried , and he lighted a candle and in

geniously held it near the neck of a third flask as he cracked

the seal,

The flame sucked inward toward the opening.

" The air's going in — that means the air in the bottle is less

elastic than the air outside, that means maybe Needham is

right! ”

For a moment Spallanzani had a queer feeling at the pit of

his stomach, his forehead was wet with nervous sweat, his

world tottered around him. ... Could that fool Needham

have made a lucky stab, a clever guess about what heat did to

a

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 43

air in sealed up flasks ? Could this windbag knock out all of

this careful finding of facts , which had taken so many years

of hard work ? For days Spallanzani went about troubled,

and snapped at students to whom before he had been gentle,

and tried to comfort himself by reciting Dante and Homer

and this only made him more grumpy. A relentless torturing

imp pricked at him and this imp said : " Find out why the air

rushes into your flasks when you break the seals — it may not

have anything to do with elasticity. ” The imp woke him up

in the night, it made him get tangled up in his masses .

Then like a flash of lightning the explanation came to him

and he hurried to his work bench - it was covered with broken

flasks and abandoned bottles and its muddled disarray told

his discouragement — he reached into a cupboard and took out

one of his flasks. He was on the track, he would show Need

ham was wrong , and even before he had proved it he stretched

himself with a heave of relief — so sure was he that the reason

for the little whistling of air had come to him. He looked at

the flasks, then smiled and said, "All the flasks that I have been

using have fairly wide necks. When I seal them in the flame

it takes a lot of heat to melt the glass till the neck is shut off

all that heat drives most of the air out of the bottle before it's

sealed up . No wonder the air rushes in when I crack the

seal! ”

He saw that Needham's idea that boiling water outside the

flask damaged the elasticity of the air inside was nonsense,

nothing less . But how to prove this , how to seal up the flasks

without driving out the air ? His devilish ingenuity came to

help him, and he took another flask, put seeds into it , and filled

it partly with pure water. Then he rolled the neck of the bot

tle around in a hot flame until it melted down to a tiny nar

row opening - very, very narrow, but still open to the air out

side . Next he let the flask cool — now the air inside must be

the same as the air outside — then he applied a tiny flame to

the now almost needle - fine opening. In a jiffy the flask was

sealed — without expelling any of the air from the inside. Cor

44 SPALLANZANI

tent, he put the bottle in boiling water and watched it bump

and dance in the kettle for an hour and while he watched he

recited verses and hummed gay tunes. He put the flask away

for days, then one morning, sure of his result, he came to his

laboratory to open it . He lighted a candle; he held it close to

the flask neck ; carefully he broke the seal — wh - i - s - s - s - t ! But

the flame blew away from the flask this time — the elasticity

of the air inside the flask was greater than that outside !

All of the long boiling had not damaged the air at all - it

was even more elastic than before - and elasticity was what

Needham said was necessary for his wonderful Vegetative

Force. The air in the flask was super -elastic, but fishing drop

after drop of the soup inside, Spallanzani couldn't find a single

little animal. Again and again , with the obstinacy of a Leeu

wenhoek , he repeated the same experiment. He broke flasks

and spilled boiling water down his shirt-front, he seared his

hands, he made vast tests that had to be done over — but al

ways he confirmed his first result.

V

Triumphant he shouted his last experiment to Europe, and

Needham and Buffon heard it , and had to sit sullenly amid

the ruins of their silly theory, there was nothing to say

Spallanzani had spiked their guns with a simple fact. Then

the Italian sat down to do a little writing himself. A virtuoso

in the laboratory, he was a fiend with his quill , when once he

was sure his facts had destroyed Needham's pleasant myth

about life arising spontaneously. Spallanzani was sure now

that even the littlest beasts had to come- always — from beasts

that had lived before. He was certain too, that a wee microbe

always remained a microbe of the same kind that its parents

had been , just as a zebra doesn't turn into a giraffe, or have

musk -oxen for children , but always stays a zebra — and has

zebra babies.

" In short,” shouted Spallanzani, “ Needham is wrong, and

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 45

I have proved that there is a law and order in the science of

animals, just as there is in the working of the stars."

Then he told the muddle that Needham would have turned

the science of little animals into — if good facts hadn't been

found to beat him. What animals this weird Vegetative Force

could make — what tricks it could do - if it had only existed !

" It could make,” said Spallanzani, " a microscopic animal

found sometimes in infusions, which like a new Protean, cease

lessly changes its form, appearing now as a body thin as a

thread, now in an oval or spherical form , sometimes coiled like

a serpent, adorned with rays and armed with horns. This re

markable animal furnishes Needham an example, to explain

easily how the Vegetative Force produces now a frog and again

a dog, sometimes a midge and at others an elephant, to -day a

spider and to -morrow a whale, this minute a cow and the next

a man ."

So ended Needham - and his Vegetative Force. It became

comfortable to live once more ; you felt sure there was no

mysterious sinister Force sneaking around waiting to change

you into a hippopotamus.

Spallanzani's name glittered in all the universities of Eu

rope; the societies considered him the first scientist of the day ;

Frederick the Great wrote long letters to him and with his own

hand made him a member of the Berlin Academy; and Fred

erick’s bitter enemy, Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, put

it over the great king by offering Spallanzani the job of pro

fessor in her ancient and run - down University of Pavia, in

Lombardy. A pompous commission came, a commission of

eminent Privy Councillors weighed down with letters and Im

perial Seals and begged Spallanzani to put this defunct col

lege on its feet. There were vast interminable arguments and

bargainings about salary - Spallanzani always knew how to

feather his nest — bargains that ended in his taking the job of

Professor of Natural History and Curator of the Natural His

tory Cabinet of Pavia.

Spallanzani went to the Museum , the Natural History Cab

46 SPA LLANZ

ANI

inet, and found that cupboard bare. He rolled up his sleeves,

he lectured about everything, he made huge public experiments

and he awed his students because his deft hands always made

these experiments turn out successfully. He sent here and

there for an astounding array of queer beasts and strange

plants and unknown birds — to fill up the empty Cabinet . He

climbed dangerous mountains himself and brought back min

erals and precious ores ; he caught hammer-head sharks and

snared gay-plumed fowl ; he went on incredible collecting ex

peditions for his museum - and to work off that tormenting

energy that made him so fantastically different from the popu

lar picture of a calm scientist. He was a Roosevelt with all

of Teddy's courage and appeal to the crowd, but with none of

Teddy's gorgeous inaccuracy.

In the intervals of this hectic collecting and lecturing he

shut himself in his laboratory with his stews and his micro

scopic animals, and made long experiments to show that these

beasts obey nature's laws, just as men and horses and ele

phants are forced to follow them . He put drops of stews

swarming with microbes on little pieces of glass and blew to

bacco smoke at them and watched them eagerly with his lens.

He cried out his delight as he saw them rush about trying to

avoid the irritating smoke. He shot electric sparks at them

and wondered at the way the little animals “ became giddy”

and spun about, and quickly died .

" The seeds or eggs of the little animals may be different

from chicken eggs or frog's eggs or fish eggs — they may stand

the heat of boiling water in my sealed flasks — but otherwise

these little creatures are really no different from other ani

mals!” he cried . Then just after that he had to take back his

confident words. ...

"Every beast on earth needs air to live, and I am going to

show just how animal these little animals are by putting them

in a vacuum -- and watching them die, ” said Spallanzani to him

self , alone one day in his laboratory. He cleverly drew out

some very thin tubes of glass, like the ones Leeuwenhoek had

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 47

.

used to study his little animals. He dipped the tube into a soup

that swarmed with his microbes ; the fluid rushed up into the

hair - fine pipe . Then Spallanzani sealed off one end of it, and

ingeniously tied the other end to a powerful vacuum pump,

and set the pump going, and stuck his lens against the thin

wall of the tube . He expected to see the wee animals stop

waving the “ little arms which they were furnished to swim

with ;” he expected them to get giddy and then stop mov

ing.

The pump chugged on — and nothing whatever happened to

the microbes. They went nonchalantly about their business

and did not seem to realize there was such a thing as life-main

taining air ! They lived for days, for weeks — and Spallanzani

did the experiment again and again, trying to find something

wrong with it . This was impossible — nothing can live without

air - how the devil do these beasts breathe ? He wrote his

amazement in a letter to his friend Bonnet :

“The nature of some of these animalcules is astonishing!

They are able to exercise in a vacuum the functions they use

in free air. They make all of their courses, they go up and

down in the liquid, they even multiply for several days in this

vacuum . How wonderful this is ! For we have always be

lieved there is no living being that can live without the advan

tages air offers it ."

Spallanzani was very proud of his imagination and his quick

brain and he was helped along in this conceit by the flattery

and admiration of students and intelligent ladies and learned

professors and conquering kings. But he was an experimenter

too — he was really an experimenter first, and he bent his head

humbly when a new fact defeated one of the brilliant

guesses of his brain .

Meanwhile this man who was so rigidly honest in his ex

periments, who would never report anything but the truth of

what he found amid the smells and poisonous vapors and shin

ing machines of his laboratory, this superbly honest, scientist,

I say , was planning low tricks to increase his pay as Professor

48 SPAL

LANZ ANI

at Pavia. Spallanzani, the football player, the climber of

mountains and explorer, this Spallanzani whined to the au

thorities at Vienna about his feeble health — the fogs and

vapors of Pavia were like to make him die , he said. To keep

him the Emperor had to increase his pay and double his vaca

tions. Spallanzani laughed and cynically called his lie a politi

cal gesture! He always got everything he wanted . He got

truth by dazzling experiments and close observation and in

sane patience; he obtained money and advancement by work

and by cunning plots and falsehoods; he received protection

from religious persecution by becoming a priest !

Now , as he grew older, he began to hanker for wild re

searches in regions remote from his little laboratory. He must

visit the site of ancient Troy whose story thrilled him so ; he

must see the harems and slaves and eunuchs, which to him

were as much a part of natural history as his bats and toads

and little animals of the seed infusions. He pulled wires, and

at last the Emperor Joseph gave him a year's leave of absence

and the money for a trip to Constantinople — for his failing

health, which had never been more superb.

So Spallanzani put his rows of flasks away and locked his

laboratory and said a dramatic and tearful good -by to his

students ; on the journey down the Mediterranean he got

frightfully sea-sick, he was shipwrecked — but didn't forget to

try to save the specimens he had collected on some islands.

The Sultan wined and dined him, the doctors of the seraglios

let him study the customs of the beauteous concubines ...

and afterward, good eighteenth century European that he was,

Spallanzani told the Turks that he admired their hospitality

and their architecture, but detested their custom of slavery

and their hopeless fatalistic view of life. ...

“We Westerners, through this new science of ours , are going

to conquer the seemingly unavoidable , the apparently eternal

torture and suffering of man ,” you can imagine him telling his "

polite but stick-in-the-mud Oriental friends . He believed in an

all powerful God, but while he believed , the spirit of the

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 49

searcher, the fact finder, flashed out of his eye, burdened all

his thought and talk , forced him to make excuses for God by

calling him Nature and the Unknown, compelled him to show

that he had appointed himself first -assistant to God in the dis

covery and even the conquering of this unknown Nature.

After many months he returned overland through the Balkan

Peninsula, escorted by companies of crack soldiers, entertained

by Bulgarian dukes and Wallachian Hospodars. At last he

came to Vienna, to pay his respects to his boss and patron , the

Emperor Joseph II — it was the dizziest moment, so far as

honors went, of his entire career . Drunk with success, he

thought, you may imagine, of how all of his dreams had come

true, and then

VI

While Spallanzani was on his triumphant voyage a dark

cloud gathered away to the south, at his university, the school

at Pavia that he had done so much to bring back to life . For

years the other professors had watched him take their students

away from them , they had watched and ground their tusks

and sharpened their razors — and waited.

Spallanzani by tireless expeditions and through many fa

tigues and dangers had made the once empty Natural History

Cabinet the talk of Europe. Besides he had a little private

collection of his own at his old home in Scandiano. One day,

Canon Volta, one of his jealous enemies, went to Scandiano and

by a trick got into Spallanzani's private museum ; he sniffed

around, then smiled an evil grin - here were some jars , and

there a bird and in another place a fish, and all of them were

labeled with the red tags of the University museum of Pavia !

Volta sneaked away hidden in the dark folds of his cloak, and

on the way home worked out his malignant plans to cook the

brilliant Spallanzani's goose ; and just before Spallanzani got

home from Vienna, Volta and Scarpa and Scopoli let hell loose

by publishing a tract and sending it to every great man and

SO SPALLANZANI

2

society in Europe, and this tract accused Spallanzani of the

nasty crime of stealing specimens from the University of

Pavia and hiding them in his own little museum at Scandiano.

His bright world came down around his ears; in a moment

he saw his gorgeous career in ruins; in hideous dreams he heard

the delighted cackles of men who praised him and envied him ;

he pictured the triumph of men whom he had soundly licked

with his clear facts and experiments — he imagined even the re

turn to life of that fool Vegetative Force. ...

But in a few days he came back on his feet, the center of a

dreadful scandal, it is true, but on his feet with his back to the

wall ready to face his accusers. Gone now was the patient.

hunter of microbes and gone the urbane correspondent of Vol

taire. He turned into a crafty politician , he demanded an in

vestigating committee and got it, he founded Ananias Clubs,

he fought fire with fire.

He returned to Pavia and on his way there I wonder what

his thoughts were — did he see himself slinking into the town,

avoided by old admirers and a victim of malignant hissing

whispers ? Possibly, but as he got near the gates of Pavia a

strange thing happened—for a mob of adoring students came

out to meet him , told him they would stick by him, escorted

him with yells of joy to his old lecture chair. The once self

sufficient, proud man's voice became husky - he blew his nose

he could only stutteringly tell them what their devotion meant

to him .

Then the investigating committee had him and his accusers

appear before it, and knowing Spallanzani as you already do ,

you may imagine the shambles that followed ! He proved

to the judges that the alleged stolen birds were misera

bly stuffed, draggle -feathered creatures which would have dis

graced the cabinet of a country school — they had been

merely pitched out. He had traded the lost snakes and the

armadillo to other museums and Pavia had profited by the

trade; not only so , but Volta, his chief accuser, had himself

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 51

stolen precious stones from the museum and given them to his

friends. ..

The judges cleared him of all guilt — though it is to -day not

perfectly sure that he wasn't a little guilty ; Volta and his com

plotters were fired from the University, and all parties , includ

ing Spallanzani, were ordered by the Emperor to stop their de

plorable brawling and shut up — this thing was getting to be a

smell all over Europe - students were breaking up the class

room furniture about it, and other universities were snickering

at such an unparalleled scandal . Spallanzani took a last crack

at his routed enemies; he called Volta a perfect bladder full of

wind and invented hideous and unprintably improper names

for Scarpa and Scopoli; then he returned peacefully to his mi

crobe hunting.

Many times in his long years of looking at the animalcules

he had wondered how they multiplied. Often he had seen two

of the wee beasts stuck together, and he wrote to Bonnet :

“When you see two individuals of any animal kind united, you

naturally think they are engaged in reproducing themselves.”

But were they ? He jotted his observations down in old note

books and made crude pictures of them , but, impetuous as he

was in many things, when it came to experiments or drawing

conclusions - he was almost as cagy as old Leeuwenhoek had

been .

Bonnet told Spallanzani's perplexity about the way little

animals multiplied to his friend , the clever but now unknown

de Saussure. And this fellow turned his sharp eye through his

clear lenses onto the breeding habits of animalcules. In a short

while he wrote a classic paper, telling the fact that when you

see two of the small beasts stuck together, they haven't come

together to breed. On the contrary - marvelous to say — these

coupled beasts are nothing more nor less than an old animal

cule which is dividing into two parts, into two new little ani

mals! This, said de Saussure, was the only way the microbes

ever multiplied — the joys of marriage were unknown to them!

52 SPALLANZANI

Reading this paper, Spallanzani rushed to his microscope

hardly believing such a strange event could be so — but careful

looking showed that de Saussure was right. The Italian wrote

the Swiss a fine letter congratulating him ; Spallanzani was a

fighter and something of a plotter; he was infernally ambi

tious and often jealous of the fame of other men, but he lost

himself in his joy at the prettiness of de Saussure's sharp ob

servations. Spallanzani and these naturalists of Geneva were

bound by a mysterious cement — a realization that the work of

finding facts and fitting facts together to build the high cathe

dral of science is greater than any single finder of facts or

mason of facts . They were the first haters of war — the first

citizens of the world, the first genuine internationalists .

Then Spallanzani was forced into one of the most devilishly

ingenious researches of his life. He was forced into this by his

friendship for his pals in Geneva and by his hatred of another

piece of scientific claptrap almost as bad as the famous Veg

etative Force . An Englishman named Ellis wrote a paper

saying de Saussure's observations about the little animals

splitting into two was all wrong. Ellis admitted that the little

beasts might occasionally break into two. “ But that, ” cried

Ellis, " doesn't mean they are multiplying ! It simply means,'

he said , " that one little animal, swimming swiftly along in the

water, bangs into another one amidships—and breaks him in

half ! That's all there is to de Saussure's fine theory .

" What is more, ” Ellis went on, " little animals are born from

each other just as larger beasts come from their mothers.

When I look carefully with my microscope , I can actually see

young ones inside the old ones, and looking still more closely

-you may not believe it — I can see grandchildren inside

these young ones.

" Rot! ” thought Spallanzani . All this stuff smelled very

fishy to him, but how to show it wasn't true , and how to show

that animalcules multiplied by breaking in two ?

He was first of all a hard scientist, and he knew that

it was one thing to say Ellis was feeble -minded, but quite an

>

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 53

other to prove that the little animals didn't bump into each

other and so knock each other apart. In a moment the one way

to decide it came to him— " All I have to do ,” he medi-

tated , “is to get one little beast off by itself, away from every

other one where nothing whatever can bump into it — and then

just sit and watch through the microscope to see if it breaks

into two." That was the simple and the only way to do it , no

doubt, but how to get one of these infernally tiny creatures

away from his swarms of companions ? You can separate one

puppy from a litter, or even a little minnow from its myriads

of brothers and sisters. But you can't reach in with your

hands and take one animalcule by the tail - curse it — it is a

million times too small for that.

Then this Spallanzani, this fellow who reveled in gaudy

celebrations and vast enthusiastic lecturings, this hero of the

crowd, this magnifico, crawled away from all his triumphs and

pleasures to do one of the cleverest and most marvelously in

genious pieces of patient work in his hectic life. He did no

less a thing than to invent a sure method of getting one ani

malcule — a few twenty - five thousandths of an inch long - a

living animalcule, off by itself.

He went to his laboratory and carefully put a drop of seed

soup swarming with animalcules on a clean piece of crystal

glass. Then with a clean hair - fine tube he put a drop of pure

distilled water — that had not a single little animal in it--on

the same glass , close to the drop that swarmed with microbes .

L " Now I shall trap one,”he muttered, as he trained his lens

on the drop that held the little animals. j He took a fine clean

needle, he stuck it carefully into the drop of microbe soup

and then made a little canal with it across to the empty water

drop. ( Quickly he turned his lens onto the passageway be

tween the two drops , and grunted satisfaction as he saw the

wriggling cavorting little creatures begin to drift through this

little canal. He grabbed for a little camel's-hair brush

“ There! there's one of the wee ones—just one, in the water

drop !” Deftly he flicked the little brush across the small

a

56 SP ALLA

NZAN I

despised conventions, which laughed at hardship , which ig

nored bad taste and the feeble pretty fitness of things ?

He knew his bladder was diseased. “Well, have it out

after I'm dead,” you can hear him whisper as he lay dying.

“ Maybe you'll find an astonishing new fact about diseased

bladders.” That was the spirit of Spallanzani. This was the

very soul of that cynical, sniffingly curious, coldly reasoning

century of his — the century that discovered few practical

things — but the same century that built the high clean house

for Faraday and Pasteur, for Arrhenius and Emil Fischer and

Ernest Rutherford to work in .

CHAPTER III

PASTEUR

MICROBES ARE A MENACE !

I

IN 1831 , thirty -two years after the magnificent Spallanzani

died, microbe hunting had come to a standstill once more .

The sub -visible animals were despised and forgotten while

other sciences were making great leaps ahead; clumsy horri

bly coughing locomotives were scaring the horses of Europe

and America ; the telegraph was getting ready to be invented .

Marvelous microscopes were being devised , but no man had

come to squint through these machines — no man had come to

prove to the world that miserable little animals could do use

ful work which no complicated steam engine could attempt ;

there was no hint of the somber fact that these wretched mi

crobes could kill their millions of human beings mysteriously

and silently, that they were much more efficient murderers

than the guillotine or the cannon of Waterloo .

On a day in October in 1831 , a nine- year -old boy ran

frightened away from the edge of a crowd that blocked the

door of the blacksmith shop of a village in the mountains of

eastern France. Above the awed excited whispers of the peo

ple at the door this boy had heard the crackling " s-s-s-s- z” of

a white hot iron on human flesh , and this terrifying sizzling

had been followed by a groan of pain. The victim was the

farmer Nicole . He had just been mangled by a mad wolf that

charged howling, jaws dripping poison foam, through the

streets of the village. The boy who ran away was Louis Pas

57

58 PAS TEUR

teur, son of a tanner of Arbois and great-grandson of a serf

of the Count of Udressier.

Days and weeks passed and eight victims of the mad wolf

died in the choking throat-parched agonies of hydrophobia.

Their screams rang in the ears of this timid-some called him

stupid - boy; and the iron that had seared the farmer's

wound burned a deep scar in his memory.

“What makes a wolf or a dog mad, father — why do people

die when mad dogs bite them ?” asked Louis. His father the

tanner was an old sergeant of the armies of Napoleon . He

had seen ten thousand men die from bullets, but he had no

notion of why people die from disease. " Perhaps a devil got

into the wolf, and if God wills you are to die, you will die,

there is no help for it,” you can hear the pious tanner answer.

That answer was as good as any answer from the wisest

scientist or the most expensive doctor in the world . In 1831

no one knew what caused people to die from mad dog bites

the cause of all disease was completely unknown and mys

terious .

I am not going to try to make believe that this terrible event

made the nine-year-old Louis Pasteur determine to find out

the cause and cure of hydrophobia some day — that would be

very romantic — but it wouldn't be true. It is true though that

he was more scared by it , haunted by it for a longer time,

brooded over it more, that he smelled the burned flesh and

heard the screams a hundred times more vividly than an ordi

nary boy would-in short, he was of the stuff of which artists

are made ; and it was this stuff in him, as much as his science,

that helped him to drag microbes out of that obscurity into

which they had passed once more, after the gorgeous Spallan

zani died. Indeed, for the first twenty years of his life he

showed no signs at all of becoming a great searcher. This

Louis Pasteur was only a plodding, careful boy whom nobody

noticed particularly. He spent his playtime painting pictures

of the river that ran by the tannery, and his sisters posed for

>

MICROBES ARE A MENACE! 59

him until their necks grew stiff and their backs ached griev

ously ; he painted curiously harsh unflattering pictures of his

mother — they didn't make her look pretty , but they looked

like his mother . ..

Meanwhile it seemed perfectly certain that the little ani

mals were going to be put permanently on the shelf along with

the dodo and other forgotten beasts. The Swede Linnæus,

most enthusiastic pigeonholer, who toiled at putting all living

things in a neat vast card catalogue, threw up his hands at

the very idea of studying the wee beasts. “ They are too small,

too confused, no one will ever know anything exact about them ,

we will simply put them in the class of Chaos! ” said Linnæus.

They were only defended by the famous round -faced German

Ehrenberg who had immense quarrels — in moments when he

wasn't crossing oceans or receiving medals - futile quarrels

about whether the little animals had stomachs, strange argu

ments about whether they were really complete little animals

or only parts of larger animals ; or whether perchance they

might be little vegetables instead of little animals.

Pasteur kept plugging at his books though, and it was while

he was still at the little college of Arbois that the first of his

masterful traits began to stick out - traits good and bad, that

made him one of the strangest mixtures of contradictions that

ever lived . He was the youngest boy at the college, but he

wanted to be a monitor ; he had a fiery ambition to teach other

boys, particularly to run other boys. He became a monitor.

Before he was twenty he had become a kind of assistant

teacher in the college of Bezançon, and here he worked like

the devil and insisted that everybody else work as hard as he

worked himself; he preached in long inspirational letters to

his poor sisters — who, God bless them , were already trying their

best

"To will is a great thing, dear sisters,” he wrote, “for

Action and Work usually follow Will , and almost always Work

is accompanied by Success. These three things, Work, Will,

60 PASTEUR

1

>

Success, fill human existence. Will opens the door to success

both brilliant and happy ; Work passes these doors, and at the

end of the journey Success comes to crown one's efforts. "

When he was seventy his sermons had lost their capital

letters, but they were exactly the same kind of simple earnest

sermons.

His father sent him up to Paris to the Normal School and

there he resolved to do great things, but he was carried away

by a homesickness for the smell of the tannery yard and he

came back to Arbois abandoning his high ambition. ... In

another year he was back at the same school in Paris and this

time he stuck at it; and then one day he passed in a tear

stained trance out of the lecture room of the chemist Dumas.

“What a science is chemistry,” he muttered, “and how marvel

ous is the popularity and glory of Dumas.” He knew then

that he was going to be a great chemist too ; the misty gray

streets of the Latin Quarter dissolved into a confused and

frivolous world that chemistry alone could save. He had left

off his painting but he was still the artist.

Presently he began to make his first stumbling independent

researches with stinking bottles and rows of tubes filled with

gorgeous colored fluids. His good friend Chappuis, a mere

student of philosophy, had to listen for hours to Pasteur's lec

tures on the crystals of tartaric acid, and Pasteur told Chap

puis : " It is sad that you are not a chemist too." He would

have made all students chemists just as forty years later he

tried to turn all doctors into microbe hunters.

Just then , as Pasteur was bending his snub nose and broad

forehead over confused piles of crystals, the sub -visible living

microbes were beginning to come back into serious notice,

they were beginning to be thought of as important serious fel

low creatures , just as useful as horses or elephants, by two

lonely searchers , one in France and one in Germany. A mod

est but original Frenchman , Cagniard de la Tour, in 1837

poked round in beer vats of breweries . He dredged up a few

foamy drops from such a vat and looked at them through a

1

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 6!

a

microscope and noticed that the tiny globules of the yeasts he

found in them sprouted buds from their sides, buds like seeds

sprouting. “They are alive then , these yeasts, they multiply

like other creatures,” he cried . His further searchings made

him see that no brew of hops and barley ever changed into

beer without the presence of the yeasts, living growing yeasts.

"It must be their life that changes barley into alcohol, ” he

meditated, and he wrote a short clear paper about it. The

world refused to get excited about this fine work of the wee

yeasts — Cagniard was no propagandist, he had no press agent

to offset his own modesty .

In the same year in Germany Doctor Schwann published a

short paper in long sentences, and these muddy phrases told

a bored public the exciting news that meat only becomes putrid

when sub-visible animals get into it . "Boil meat thoroughly

and put it in a clean bottle and lead air into it that has passed

through red-hot pipes — the meat will remain perfectly fresh

for months. But in a day or two after you remove the stopper

and let in ordinary air, with its little animals, the meat will be

gin to smell dreadfully ; it will teem with wriggling, cavorting

creatures a thousand times smaller than a pinhead — it is these

beasts that make meat go bad . "

How Leeuwenhoek would have opened his large eyes at

this ! Spallanzani would have dismissed his congregation and

rushed from his masses to his laboratory ; but Europe hardly

looked up from its newspapers, and young Pasteur was getting

ready to make his own first great chemical discovery.

When he was twenty -six years old he made it . After long

peerings at heaps of tiny crystals he discovered that there are

four distinct kinds of tartaric acid instead of two ; that there

are a variety of strange compounds in nature that are exactly

alike - excepting that they are mirror-images of each other.

When he stretched his arms and straightened up his lame

back and realized what he had done, he rushed out of

his dirty dark little laboratory into the hall , threw his arms

around a young physics assistant — he hardly knew him — and

62 PASTEUR

took him out under the thick shade of the Gardens of the

Luxembourg. There he poured mouthfuls of triumphant ex

planation at him — he must tell some one. He wanted to tell

the world !

II

1

1 In a month he was praised by gray -haired chemists and be

came the companion of learned men three times his age. He

was made professor at Strasbourg and in the off moments of

researches he determined to marry the daughter of the dean .

He didn't know if she cared for him but he sat down and wrote

her a letter that he knew must make her love him :

“There is nothing in me to attract a young girl's fancy ,” he

wrote , “ but my recollections tell me that those who have

known me very well have loved me very much . ”

So she married him and became one of the most famous and

long -suffering and in many ways one of the happiest wives in

history — and this story will have more to tell about her.

Now the head of a house, Pasteur threw himself more furi

ously into his work ; forgetting the duties and chivalries of a

bridegroom, he turned his nights into days. “ I am on the

verge of mysteries, ” he wrote, "and the veil is getting thinner

and thinner. The nights seem to me too long. I am often

scolded by Madame Pasteur, but I tell her I shall lead her to

fame. ” He continued his work on crystals; he ran into blind

alleys, he did strange and foolish and impossible experiments,

the kind a crazy man might devise — and the kind that turn

a crazy man into a genius when they come off. He tried to

change the chemistry of living things by putting them

between huge magnets. He devised weird clockworks that

swung plants back and forward , hoping so to change the mys

terious molecules that formed these plants into mirror images

of themselves . ... He tried to imitate God : he tried to

change species!

Madame Pasteur waited up nights for him and marveled

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 63

.

at him and believed in him, and she wrote to his father: "You

know that the experiments he is undertaking this year will

give us, if they succeed, a Newton or a Galileo ! ” It is not

clear whether good Madame Pasteur formed this so high opin

ion of her young husband by herself. . . . At any rate, truth ,

that will o' the wisp, failed him this time - his experiments

didn't come off.

Then Pasteur was made Professor and Dean of the Faculty

of Sciences in Lille and there he settled down in the Street of

the Flowers, and it was here that he ran, or rather stumbled

for the first time, upon microbes; it was in this good solid town

of distillers and sugar -beet raisers and farm implement dealers

that he began his great campaign, part science, part drama and

romance, part religion and politics, to put microbes on the

map . It was from this not too interesting middle sized city

never noted for learning — that he splashed up a great wave of

excitement about microbes that rocked the boat of science for

thirty years. He showed the world how important microbes

were to it, and in doing this he made enemies and worshipers;

his name filled the front pages of newspapers and he received

challenges to duels ; the public made vast jokes about his

precious microbes while his discoveries were saving the lives

of countless women in childbirth . In short it was here he

hopped off in his flight to immortality.

When he left Strasbourg truth was tricking him and he was

confused . He came to Lille and fairly stumbled on to the road

to fame— by offering help to a beet-sugar distiller.

When Pasteur settled in Lille he was told by the authorities

that highbrow science was all right

“ But what we want, what this enterprising city of Lille

wants most of all, professor," you can hear the Committee of

business men telling him, “ is a close coöperation between your

science and our industries. What we want to know is does

science pay ? Raise our sugar yield from our beets and give

us a bigger alcohol output, and we'll see you and your labora

tory are taken care of.”

а .

64 1PASTEUR

1

Pasteur listened politely and then proceeded to show them

the stuff he was made of. He was much more than a man

of science ! Think of a committee of business men asking

Isaac Newton to show them how his laws of motion were going

to help their iron works! That shy thinker would have thrown

up his hands and set himself to studying the meaning of the

prophecies of the Book of Daniel at once. Faraday would

have gone back to his first job as a bookbinder's apprentice.

But Pasteur was no shrinking flower. A child of the nine

teenth century , he understood that science had to earn its

bread and butter, and he started to make himself popular with

everybody by giving thrilling lectures to the townspeople on

science :

" Where in your families will you find a young man whose

curiosity and interest will not immediately be awakened when

you put into his hands a potato, and when with that potato

he may produce sugar, and with that sugar alcohol, and with

that alcohol ether and vinegar?” he shouted enthusiastically

one evening to an audience of prosperous manufacturers and

their wives. Then one day Mr. Bigo, a distiller of alcohol

from sugar beets, came to his laboratory in distress. “We're

having trouble with our fermentations, Professor," he com

plained; "we're losing thousands of francs every day. I won

der if you could come over to the factory and help us out? ”

said the good Bigo.

Bigo's son was a student in the science course and Pasteur

hastened to oblige. He went to the distillery and sniffed at

the vats that were sick, that wouldn't make alcohol; he fished

up some samples of the grayish slimy mess and put them in

bottles to take to his laboratory — and he didn't fail to take

some of the beet pulp from the healthy foamy vats where

good amounts of alcohol were being made. Pasteur had no

idea he could help Bigo , he knew nothing of how sugar fer

ments into alcohol - indeed, no chemist in the world knew any

thing about it. He got back to his laboratory, scratched his

head, and decided to examine the stuff from the healthy vats

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 65

>

first. He put some of this stuff - a drop of it — before his

microscope, maybe with an aimless idea of looking for crys

tals, and he found this drop was full of tiny globules, much

smaller than any crystal, and these little globes were yellowish

in color, and their insides were full of a swarm of curious

dancing specks.

“What can these things be, " he muttered . Then suddenly

he remembered

“ Of course, I should have known — these are the yeasts you

find in all stews that have sugar which is fermenting into alco

hol! ”

He looked again and saw the wee spheres alone; he saw some

in bunches, others in chains, and then to his wonder he came

on some with queer buds sprouting from their sides — they

looked like sprouts on infinitely tiny seeds.

“Cagniard de la Tour is right. These yeasts are alive. It

must be the yeasts that change beet sugar into alcohol !” he

cried . “ But that doesn't help Mr. Bigo what on earth can

be the matter with the stuff in the sick vats? ” He grabbed for

the bottle that held the stuff from the sick vat, he sniffed at

it, he peered at it with a little magnifying glass, he tasted it,

he dipped little strips of blue paper in it and watched them

turn red . . . . Then he put a drop from it before his micro

scope and looked. ...

" But there are no yeasts in this one ; where are the yeasts ?

There is nothing here but a mass of confused stuff - what is

it, what does this mean ? ” He took the bottle up again and

brooded over it with an eye that saw nothing — till at last a dif

ferent, a strange look of the juice forced its way up into his

wool-gathering thoughts. "Here are little gray specks stick

ing to the walls of the bottle_here are some more floating on

the surface - wait ! No, there aren't any in the healthy stuff-

where there are yeasts and alcohol. What can that mean ? ”

he pondered. Then he fished down into the bottle and got a

speck, with some trouble, into a drop of pure water; he put it

before his microscope.

54 SPALLANZANI

canal, wiping it out, so cutting off the chance of any other wee

beast getting into the water drop to join its lonely little

comrade,

" God ! " he cried. "I've done it — no one's ever done this be

fore — I've got one animalcule all by himself; now nothing can

bump him, now we'll see if he'll turn into two new ones!” His

lens hardly quivered as he sat with tense neck and hands and

arms, back bent, eye squinting through the glass at the drop

with its single inhabitant. " How tiny he is, ” he thought— "he

is like a lone fish in the spacious abysses of the sea. ”

Then a strange sight startled him, not less dramatic for its

unbelievable littleness. The beast - it was shaped like a small

rod — began to get thinner and thinner in the middle. At last

the two parts of it were held together by the thickness of a

spider web thread, and the two thick halves began to wriggle

desperately — and suddenly they jerked apart. There they

were, two perfectly formed , gently gliding little beasts, where

there had been one before. They were a little shorter but

otherwise they couldn't be told from their parent. Then ,

what was more marvelous to see, these two children of the

first one in a score of minutes split up again - and now there

were four where there had been one !

Spallanzani did this ingenious trick a dozen times and got

the same result and saw the same thing; and then he de

scended on the unlucky Ellis like a ton of brick and flattened

into permanent obscurity Ellis and his fine yarn about the

children and the grandchildren inside the little animals.

Spallanzani was sniffish, he condescended, he advised , he told

Ellis to go back to school and learn his a b c's of microbe

hunting. He hinted that Ellis wouldn't have made his mistake

if he'd read the fine paper of de Saussure carefully , instead

of inventing preposterous theories that only cluttered up the

hard job of getting genuine new facts from a stingy Nature.

A scientist, a really original investigator of nature, is like

a writer or a painter or a musician . He is part artist, part cool

searcher. Spallanzani told himself stories , he conceived him

MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS ! 55

self the hero of a new epic exploration, he compared himself

-in his writings even — to Columbus and Vespucci. He told

of that mysterious world of microbes as a new universe, and

thought of himself as a daring explorer making first groping

expeditions along its boundaries only. He said nothing about

the possible deadliness of the little animals — he didn't like to

engage, in print , in wild speculations — but his genius whis.

pered to him that the fantastic creatures of this new world

were of some sure but yet unknown importance to their big

brothers, the human species .

VII

Early in the year 1799, as Napoleon started thoroughly

smashing an old world to pieces, and just as Beethoven was

knocking at the door of the nineteenth century with the first of

his mighty symphonies, war-cries of that defiant spirit of

which Spallanzani was one of the chief originators—in the year

1799, I say , the great microbe hunter was struck with

apoplexy . Three days later he was poking his energetic and

irrepressible head above the bedclothes, reciting Tasso and

Homer to the amusement and delight of those friends who had

come to watch him die. But though he refused to admit it ,

this, as one of his biographers says, was his Canto di Cigno, his

swan song, for in a few days he was dead.

Great Egyptian kings kept their names alive for posterity

by having the court undertaker embalm them into expensive

and gorgeous mummies. The Greeks and Romans had their

likenesses wrought into dignified statues . Paintings exist of a

hundred other distinguished men . What is left for us to see

of the marvelous Spallanzani ?

In Pavia there is a modest little bust of him and in the

museum near by, if you are interested, you may see — his

bladder. What better epitaph could there be for Spallanzani?

What relic could more perfectly suggest the whole of his pas

sion to find truth, that passion which stopped at nothing, which

56 SPA LLANZ

ANI

despised conventions, which laughed at hardship , which ig

nored bad taste and the feeble pretty fitness of things ?

He knew his bladder was diseased . “ Well, have it out

after I'm dead,” you can hear him whisper as he lay dying.

“ Maybe you'll find an astonishing new fact about diseased

bladders.” That was the spirit of Spallanzani. This was the

very soul of that cynical, sniffingly curious, coldly reasoning

century of his — the century that discovered few practical

things — but the same century that built the high clean house

for Faraday and Pasteur, for Arrhenius and Emil Fischer and

Ernest Rutherford to work in .

CHAPTER III

PASTEUR

MICROBES ARE A MENACE !

I

IN 1831, thirty -two years after the magnificent Spallanzani

died, microbe hunting had come to a standstill once more.

The sub- visible animals were despised and forgotten while

other sciences were making great leaps ahead; clumsy horri

bly coughing locomotives were scaring the horses of Europe

and America ; the telegraph was getting ready to be invented.

Marvelous microscopes were being devised , but no man had

come to squint through these machines — no man had come to

prove to the world that miserable little animals could do use

ful work which no complicated steam engine could attempt;

there was no hint of the somber fact that these wretched mi

crobes could kill their millions of human beings mysteriously

and silently, that they were much more efficient murderers

than the guillotine or the cannon of Waterloo.

On a day in October in 1831 , a nine-year-old boy ran

frightened away from the edge of a crowd that blocked the

door of the blacksmith shop of a village in the mountains of

eastern France. Above the awed excited whispers of the peo

ple at the door this boy had heard the crackling " s-S-S-s- z” of

a white hot iron on human flesh , and this terrifying sizzling

had been followed by a groan of pain. The victim was the

farmer Nicole . He had just been mangled by a mad wolf that

charged howling, jaws dripping poison foam, through the

streets of the village. The boy who ran away was Louis Pas

57

58 PAS TEUR

teur, son of a tanner of Arbois and great-grandson of a serf

of the Count of Udressier.

Days and weeks passed and eight victims of the mad wolf

died in the choking throat-parched agonies of hydrophobia.

Their screams rang in the ears of this timid - some called him

stupid - boy ; and the iron that had seared the farmer's

wound burned a deep scar in his memory .

"What makes a wolf or a dog mad, father - why do people

die when mad dogs bite them ? " asked Louis. His father the

tanner was an old sergeant of the armies of Napoleon . He

had seen ten thousand men die from bullets, but he had no

notion of why people die from disease. "Perhaps a devil got

into the wolf, and if God wills you are to die, you will die,

there is no help for it,” you can hear the pious tanner answer.

That answer was as good as any answer from the wisest

scientist or the most expensive doctor in the world. In 1831

no one knew what caused people to die from mad dog bites—

the cause of all disease was completely unknown and mys

terious .

I am not going to try to make believe that this terrible event

made the nine-year-old Louis Pasteur determine to find out

the cause and cure of hydrophobia some day — that would be

very romantic - but it wouldn't be true. It is true though that

he was more scared by it, haunted by it for a longer time,

brooded over it more, that he smelled the burned flesh and

heard the screams a hundred times more vividly than an ordi

nary boy would - in short, he was of the stuff of which artists

are made ; and it was this stuff in him, as much as his science,

that helped him to drag microbes out of that obscurity into

which they had passed once more, after the gorgeous Spallan

zani died. Indeed, for the first twenty years of his life he

showed no signs at all of becoming a great searcher. This

Louis Pasteur was only a plodding, careful boy whom nobody

noticed particularly. He spent his playtime painting pictures

of the river that ran by the tannery, and his sisters posed for

MICROBES ARE A MENACE !! 59

him until their necks grew stiff and their backs ached griev

ously ; he painted curiously harsh unflattering pictures of his

mother — they didn't make her look pretty , but they looked

like his mother....

Meanwhile it seemed perfectly certain that the little ani

mals were going to be put permanently on the shelf along with

the dodo and other forgotten beasts. The Swede Linnæus,

most enthusiastic pigeonholer, who toiled at putting all living

things in a neat vast card catalogue, threw up his hands at

the very idea of studying the wee beasts. “They are too small,

too confused, no one will ever know anything exact about them ,

we will simply put them in the class of Chaos ! ” said Linnæus.

They were only defended by the famous round - faced German

Ehrenberg who had immense quarrels — in moments when he

wasn't crossing oceans or receiving medals—futile quarrels

about whether the little animals had stomachs, strange argu

ments about whether they were really complete little animals

or only parts of larger animals ; or whether perchance they

might be little vegetables instead of little animals.

Pasteur kept plugging at his books though, and it was while

he was still at the little college of Arbois that the first of his

masterful traits began to stick out — traits good and bad, that

made him one of the strangest mixtures of contradictions that

ever lived . He was the youngest boy at the college, but he

wanted to be a monitor; he had a fiery ambition to teach other

boys, particularly to run other boys. He became a monitor.

Before he was twenty he had become a kind of assistant

teacher in the college of Bezançon, and here he worked like

the devil and insisted that everybody else work as hard as he

worked himself; he preached in long inspirational letters to

his poor sisters — who, God bless them, were already trying their

best

" To will is a great thing, dear sisters,” he wrote , “ for

Action and Work usually follow Will , and almost always Work

is accompanied by Success . These three things, Work, Will,

a

60 PASTEUR

>

Success, fill human existence . Will opens the door to success

both brilliant and happy ; Work passes these doors , and at the

end of the journey Success comes to crown one's efforts.”

When he was seventy his sermons had lost their capital

letters, but they were exactly the same kind of simple earnest

sermons.

His father sent him up to Paris to the Normal School and

there he resolved to do great things, but he was carried away

by a homesickness for the smell of the tannery yard and he

came back to Arbois abandoning his high ambition. . . . In

another year he was back at the same school in Paris and this

time he stuck at it; and then one day he passed in a tear

stained trance out of the lecture room of the chemist Dumas.

“What a science is chemistry,” he muttered, “and how marvel

ous is the popularity and glory of Dumas. ” He knew then

that he was going to be a great chemist too; the misty gray

streets of the Latin Quarter dissolved into a confused and

frivolous world that chemistry alone could save. He had left

off his painting but he was still the artist.

Presently he began to make his first stumbling independent

researches with stinking bottles and rows of tubes filled with

gorgeous colored fluids. His good friend Chappuis, a mere

student of philosophy , had to listen for hours to Pasteur's lec

tures on the crystals of tartaric acid, and Pasteur told Chap

puis : " It is sad that you are not a chemist too.” He would

have made all students chemists just as forty years later he

tried to turn all doctors into microbe hunters.

Just then , as Pasteur was bending his snub nose and broad

forehead over confused piles of crystals, the sub -visible living

microbes were beginning to come back into serious notice,

they were beginning to be thought of as important serious fel

low creatures, just as useful as horses or elephants, by two

lonely searchers, one in France and one in Germany. A mod

est but original Frenchman , Cagniard de la Tour, in 1837

poked round in beer vats of breweries . He dredged up a few

foamy drops from such a vat and looked at them through a

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 6:

a

microscope and noticed that the tiny globules of the yeasts he

found in them sprouted buds from their sides, buds like seeds

sprouting. “They are alive then, these yeasts, they multiply

like other creatures,” he cried. His further searchings made

him see that no brew of hops and barley ever changed into

beer without the presence of the yeasts, living growing yeasts.

"It must be their life that changes barley into alcohol ,” he

meditated , and he wrote a short clear paper about it. The

world refused to get excited about this fine work of the wee

yeasts — Cagniard was no propagandist, he had no press agent

to offset his own modesty.

In the same year in Germany Doctor Schwann published a

short paper in long sentences, and these muddy phrases told

a bored public the exciting news that meat only becomes putrid

when sub-visible animals get into it. " Boil meat thoroughly

and put it in a clean bottle and lead air into it that has passed

through red-hot pipes — the meat will remain perfectly fresh

for months. But in a day or two after you remove the stopper

and let in ordinary air, with its little animals, the meat will be

gin to smell dreadfully ; it will teem with wriggling, cavorting

creatures a thousand times smaller than a pinhead — it is these

beasts that make meat go bad . "

How Leeuwenhoek would have opened his large eyes at

this! Spallanzani would have dismissed his congregation and

rushed from his masses to his laboratory ; but Europe hardly

looked up from its newspapers, and young Pasteur was getting

ready to make his own first great chemical discovery.

When he was twenty -six years old he made it . After long

peerings at heaps of tiny crystals he discovered that there are

four distinct kinds of tartaric acid instead of two; that there

are a variety of strange compounds in nature that are exactly

alike excepting that they are mirror-images of each other.

When he stretched his arms and straightened up his lame

back and realized what he had done, he rushed out of

his dirty dark little laboratory into the hall , threw his arms

around a young physics assistant — he hardly knew him - and

62 PASTEUR

took him out under the thick shade of the Gardens of the

Luxembourg. There he poured mouthfuls of triumphant ex

planation at him - he must tell some one. He wanted to tell

the world !

II

>

In a month he was praised by gray -haired chemists and be

came the companion of learned men three times his age. He

was made professor at Strasbourg and in the off moments of

researches he determined to marry the daughter of the dean.

He didn't know if she cared for him but he sat down and wrote

her a letter that he knew must make her love him :

“There is nothing in me to attract a young girl's fancy,” he

wrote, “ but my recollections tell me that those who have

known me very well have loved me very much .”

So she married him and became one of the most famous and

long -suffering and in many ways one of the happiest wives in

history — and this story will have more to tell about her.

Now the head of a house, Pasteur threw himself more furi

ously into his work ; forgetting the duties and chivalries of a

bridegroom, he turned his nights into days. “ I am on the

verge of mysteries,” he wrote, "and the veil is getting thinner

and thinner. The nights seem to me too long. I am often

scolded by Madame Pasteur, but I tell her I shall lead her to

fame.” He continued his work on crystals; he ran into blind

alleys, he did strange and foolish and impossible experiments,

the kind a crazy man might devise -- and the kind that turn

a crazy man into a genius when they come off. He tried to

change the chemistry of living things by putting them

between huge magnets. He devised weird clockworks that

swung plants back and forward, hoping so to change the mys

terious molecules that formed these plants into mirror images

of themselves. ... He tried to imitate God : he tried to

change species!

Madame Pasteur waited up nights for him and marveled

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 63

O

at him and believed in him, and she wrote to his father : “You

know that the experiments he is undertaking this year will

give us, if they succeed, a Newton or a Galileo !” It is not

clear whether good Madame Pasteur formed this so high opin

ion of her young husband by herself. . . . At any rate, truth ,

that will o' the wisp, failed him this time — his experiments

didn't come off.

Then Pasteur was made Professor and Dean of the Faculty

of Sciences in Lille and there he settled down in the Street of

the Flowers, and it was here that he ran , or rather stumbled

for the first time, upon microbes ; it was in this good solid town

of distillers and sugar-beet raisers and farm implement dealers

that he began his great campaign , part science, part drama and

romance, part religion and politics, to put microbes on the

map . It was from this not too interesting middle sized city

never noted for learning — that he splashed up a great wave of

excitement about microbes that rocked the boat of science for

thirty years. He showed the world how important microbes

were to it, and in doing this he made enemies and worshipers;

his name filled the front pages of newspapers and he received

challenges to duels ; the public made vast jokes about his

precious microbes while his discoveries were saving the lives

of countless women in childbirth . In short it was here he

hopped off in his flight to immortality.

When he left Strasbourg truth was tricking him and he was

confused . He came to Lille and fairly stumbled on to the road

to fame— by offering help to a beet-sugar distiller.

When Pasteur settled in Lille he was told by the authorities

that highbrow science was all right

“ But what we want, what this enterprising city of Lille

wants most of all, professor,” you can hear the Committee of

business men telling him , “ is a close coöperation between your.

science and our industries . What we want to know is - does

science pay ? Raise our sugar yield from our beets and give

us a bigger alcohol output, and we'll see you and your labora

tory are taken care of. ”

64 PASTEUR

Pasteur listened politely and then proceeded to show them

the stuff he was made of . He was much more than a man

of science! Think of a committee of business men asking

Isaac Newton to show them how his laws of motion were going

to help their iron works! That shy thinker would have thrown.

up his hands and set himself to studying the meaning of the

prophecies of the Book of Daniel at once. Faraday would

have gone back to his first job as a bookbinder's apprentice.

But Pasteur was no shrinking flower . A child of the nine

teenth century, he understood that science had to earn its

bread and butter, and he started to make himself popular with

everybody by giving thrilling lectures to the townspeople on

science :

"Where in your families will you find a young man whose

curiosity and interest will not immediately be awakened when

you put into his hands a potato, and when with that potato

he may produce sugar, and with that sugar alcohol, and with

that alcohol ether and vinegar? ” he shouted enthusiastically

one evening to an audience of prosperous manufacturers and

their wives. Then one day Mr. Bigo, a distiller of alcohol

from sugar beets, came to his laboratory in distress. “ We're

having trouble with our fermentations, Professor," he com

plained; " we're losing thousands of francs every day. I won

der if you could come over to the factory and help us out? ”

said the good Bigo.

Bigo's son was a student in the science course and Pasteur

hastened to oblige. He went to the distillery and sniffed at

the vats that were sick, that wouldn't make alcohol; he fished

up some samples of the grayish slimy mess and put them in

bottles to take to his laboratory — and he didn't fail to take

some of the beet pulp from the healthy foamy vats where

good amounts of alcohol were being made. Pasteur had no

idea he could help Bigo, he knew nothing of how sugar fer

ments into alcohol- indeed, no chemist in the world knew any

thing about it. He got back to his laboratory, scratched his

head, and decided to examine the stuff from the healthy vats

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 65

first . He put some of this stuff - a drop of it - before his

microscope, maybe with an aimless idea of looking for crys

tals, and he found this drop was full of tiny globules, much

smaller than any crystal, and these little globes were yellowish

in color, and their insides were full of a swarm of curious

dancing specks.

“What can these things be, ” he muttered . Then suddenly

be remembered

“ Of course, I should have known — these are the yeasts you

find in all stews that have sugar which is fermenting into alco

hol ! ”

He looked again and saw the wee spheres alone; he saw some

in bunches, others in chains, and then to his wonder he came

on some with queer buds sprouting from their sides — they

looked like sprouts on infinitely tiny seeds.

“Cagniard de la Tour is right. These yeasts are alive. It

must be the yeasts that change beet sugar into alcohol !” he

cried . “ But that doesn't help Mr. Bigo - what on earth can

be the matter with the stuff in the sick vats ?” He grabbed for

the bottle that held the stuff from the sick vat, he sniffed at

it, he peered at it with a little magnifying glass, he tasted it,

he dipped little strips of blue paper in it and watched them

turn red. . . . Then he put a drop from it before his micro

scope and looked . ...

" But there are no yeasts in this one; where are the yeasts ?

There is nothing here but a mass of confused stuff - what is

it, what does this mean ?” He took the bottle up again and

brooded over it with an eye that saw nothing — till at last a dif

ferent, a strange look of the juice forced its way up into his

wool- gathering thoughts. " Here are little gray specks stick

ing to the walls of the bottle_here are some more floating on

the surface — wait ! No, there aren't any in the healthy stuff

where there are yeasts and alcohol. What can that mean ? ”

he pondered . Then he fished down into the bottle and got a

speck, with some trouble, into a drop of pure water; he put it

before his microscope. ...

66 PASTEUR

.

His moment had come.

No yeast globes here, no, but something different, something

strange he had never seen before, great tangled dancing masses

of tiny rod-like things, some of them alone, some drifting along

like strings of boats, all of them shimmying with a weird in

cessant vibration . He hardly dared to guess at their size_they

were much smaller than the yeasts — they were only one

twenty - five -thousandth of an inch long!

That night he tossed and didn't sleep and next morning his

stumpy legs hurried him back to the beet factory. His glasses

awry on his nearsighted eyes , he leaned over and dredged up

other samples from other sick vats — he forgot all about Bigo

and thought nothing of helping Bigo; Bigo didn't exist ; noth

ing in the world existed but his sniffing curious self and these

dancing strange rods. In every one of the grayish specks he

found millions of them . ... Feverishly at night with Madame

Pasteur waiting up for him and at last going to bed without

him , he set up apparatus that made his laboratory look like

an alchemist's den. He found that the rod -swarming juice

from the sick vats always contained the acid of sour milk

and no alcohol. Suddenly a thought flooded through his brain :

“ Those little rods in the juice of the sick vats are alive,

and it is they that make the acid of sour milk — the rods fight

with the yeasts perhaps, and get the upper hand. They are

the ferment of the sour-milk -acid, just as the yeasts must

be the ferment of the alcohol!” He rushed up to tell the

patient Madame Pasteur about it, the only half-understanding

Madame Pasteur who knew nothing of fermentations, the

Madame Pasteur who helped him so by believing always in his

wild enthusiasms.

It was only a guess but there was something inside him that

whispered to him that it was surely true. There was nothing

uncanny about the rightness of his guess ; Pasteur made thou

sands of guesses about the thousand strange events of nature

that met his shortsighted peerings. Many of these guesses

were wrong — but when he did hit on a right one, how he did

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 67

>

test it and prove it and sniff along after it and chase it and

throw himself on it and bring it to earth ! So it was now, when

he was sure he had solved the ten -thousand -year -old mystery

of fermentation .

His head buzzed with a hundred confused plans to see if

he was really right, but he never neglected the business men

and their troubles, or the authorities or the farmers or his

students. He turned part of his laboratory into a manure test

ing station, he hurried to Paris and tried to get himself elected

to the Academy of Sciences — and failed — and he took his

classes on educational trips to breweries in Valenciennes and

foundries in Belgium . In the middle of this he felt sure, one

day, that he had a way to prove that the little rods were alive,

that in spite of their miserable littleness they did giant's work,

the work no giant could do - of changing sugar into lactic acid.

" I can't study these rods that I think are alive in this

mixed -up mess of the juice of the beet-pulp from the vats , "

Pasteur pondered. “ I shall have to invent some kind of clear

soup for them so that I can see what goes on — I'll have to

invent this special food for them and then see if they multiply,

if they have young, if a thousand of the small dancing beings

appears where there was only one at first. ” He tried putting

some of the grayish specks from the sick vats into pure sugar

water. They refused to grow in it. “The rods need a richer

food , ” he meditated , and after many failures he devised a

strange soup ; he took some dried yeast and boiled it in pure

water and strained it so that it was perfectly clear, he added

an exact amount of sugar and a little carbonate of chalk to

keep the soup from being acid. Then on the point of a fine

needle he fished up one of the gray specks from some juice of

a sick fermentation . Carefully he sowed this speck in his new

clear soup — and put the bottle in an incubating oven — and

waited , waited anxious and nervous ; it is this business of ex

periments not coming off at once that is always the curse of

microbe hunting.

He waited and signed some vouchers and lectured to stu.

68 PASTEUR

.

dents and came back to peer into his incubator at his precious

bottle and advised farmers about their crops and fertilizers and

bolted absent-minded meals and peered once more at his tubes

and waited . He went to bed without knowing what was

happening in his bottle — it is hard to sleep when you do not

know such things.

All the next day it was the same, but toward evening when

his legs began to be heavy with failure once more, he muttered :

“There is no clear broth that will let me see these beastly rods

growing — but I'll just look once more "

He held the bottle up to the solitary gaslight that painted

grotesque giant shadows of the apparatus on the laboratory

walls. “ Sure enough, there's something changing here, " he

whispered; “ there are rows of little bubbles coming up from

some of the gray specks I sowed in the bottle yesterday

there are many new gray specks — all of them are sprouting

bubbles ! ” Then he became deaf and dumb and blind to the

world of men ; he stayed entranced before his little incubator ;

hours floated by , hours that might have been seconds for him .

He took up his bottle caressingly ; he shook it gently before the

light — little spirals of gray murky cloud curled up from the

bottom of the flask and from these spirals came big bubbles

of gas. Now he would find out !

He put a drop from the bottle before his microscope.

Eureka ! The field of the lens swarmed and vibrated with

shimmying millions of the tiny rods. “ They multiply ! They

are alive !” he whispered to himself, then shouted : “Yes, I'll

be up in a little while ! " to Madame Pasteur who had called

down begging him to come up for dinner, to come for a little

rest. For hours he did not come .

Time and again in the days that followed he did the same

experiment, putting a tiny drop from a flask that swarmed

with rods into a fresh clear flask of yeast soup that had none

at all — and every time the rods appeared in billions and each

time they made new quantities of the acid of sour milk. Then

Pasteur burst out — he was act a patient man — to tell the

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 69

world. He told Mr. Bigo it was the little rods that made his

fermentations sick : "Keep the little rods out of your vats and

you'll always get alcohol, Mr. Bigo. ” He told his classes about

his great discovery that such infinitely tiny beasts could make

acid of sour milk from sugar - a thing no mere man had ever

done or could do. He wrote the news to his old Professor

Dumas and to all his friends and he read papers about it to

the Lille Scientific Society and sent a learned treatise to the

Academy of Sciences in Paris. It is not clear whether Mr.

Bigo found it possible to keep the little rods out of his vats

for they were like bad weeds that get into gardens. But to

Pasteur that didn't matter so much . Here was the one im

portant fact:

It is living things, sub -visible living beings, that are the real

cause of fermentations !

Innocently he told every one that his discovery was remark

able he was too much of a child to be modest — and from

now on and for years these little ferments filled his sky ; he ate

and slept and dreamed and loved - after his absent-minded

fashion — with his ferments by him . They were his life.

He worked alone for he had no assistant, not even a boy

to wash his bottles for him ; how then , you will ask, did he

find time to cram his days with such a bewildering jumble of

events ? Partly because he was an energetic man, and partly

it was thanks to Madame Pasteur, who in the words of Roux,

“loved him even to the point of understanding his work.” On

those evenings when she wasn't waiting up lonely for him

when she had finished putting to bed those children whose

absent-minded father he was — this brave lady sat primly on

a straight-backed chair at a little table and wrote scientific

papers at his dictation. Again, while he was below brooding

over his tubes and bottles she would translate the cramped

scrawls of his notebooks into a clear beautiful handwriting.

Pasteur was her life and since Pasteur thought only of work

her own life melted more and more into his work.

70 PASTEUR

III

Then one day in the midst of all this — they were just nicely

settled in Lille — he came to her and said : “We are going to

Paris, I have just been made Administrator and Director of

Scientific Studies in the Normal School. This is my great

chance.”

They moved there, and Pasteur found there was absolutely

no place for him to work in ; there were a few dirty laboratories

for the students but none for the professors ; what was worse,

the Minister of Instruction told him there was not one cent

in the budget for those bottles and ovens and microscopes with

out which he could not live. But Pasteur snooped round in

every cranny of the dirty old building and at last climbed

tricky stairs to a tiny room where rats played, to an attic

under the roof. He chased the rats out and proclaimed this

den his laboratory ; he got money — in some mysterious way

that is still not clear — for his microscopes and tubes and

flasks. The world must know how important ferments are in

its life. The world soon knew !

His experiment with the little rods that made the acid of

sour milk convinced him — why, no one can tell -- that other

kinds of small beings did a thousand other gigantic and useful

and perhaps dangerous things in the world. “ It is those yeasts

that my microscope showed me in the healthy beet vats, it is

those yeasts that turn sugar into alcohol - it is undoubtedly

yeasts that make beer from barley and it is certainly yeasts

that ferment grapes into wine - I haven't proved it yet, but I

know it .” Energetically he wiped his fogged spectacles and

cheerfully he climbed to his attic. Experiments would tell

him ; he must make experiments ; he must prove to himself he

was right-more especially he must prove to the world he

was right. But the world of science was against him.

Liebig, the great German , the prince of chemists, the pope

of chemistry, was opposed to his idea. “ So Liebig says yeasts

have nothing to do with the turning of sugar into alcohol - 50

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 71

a

.

ne claims that you have to have albumen there, and that it is

just the albumen breaking down that carries the sugar along

down with it, into alcohol.” He would show this Liebig !

Then a trick to beat Liebig flashed into his head, a crafty trick ,

a simple clear experiment that would smash Liebig and all

other pooh -bahs of chemistry who scorned the important work

that his precious microscopic creatures might do.

“What I have to do is to grow yeasts in a soup that has no

albumen in it at all. If yeasts will turn sugar into alcohol in

such a soup — then Liebig and his theories are finished.”

Defiance was in every fiber of him. This business was turn

ing from an affair of cold science into a purely personal matter.

But it was one thing to have this bright idea and quite another

to find an albumenless food for yeasts — yeasts were squeamish

in their tastes, confound them — and he fussed around his

drafty attic and was for weeks an exasperated, a very grumpy

Pasteur. Until one morning a happy accident cleared the road

for him .

He had by chance put some salt of ammonia into an albumen

soup in which he grew the yeasts for his experiments. “ What's“

this,” he meditated . “The ammonia salt keeps disappearing as

my yeasts bud and multiply. What does this mean ? " He

thought, he fumbled— "Wait ! The yeasts use up the

ammonia salt, they will grow without the albumen ! ” He

slammed shut the door of his attic room , he must be alone

while he worked - he loved to be alone as he worked just as

he greatly enjoyed spouting his glorious results to worshipful,

brilliant audiences. He took clean flasks and poured distilled

water into them, and carefully weighed out pure sugar and

slid it into this water, and then put in his ammonia salt - it

was the tartrate of ammonia that he used. He reached for

a bottle that swarmed with young budding yeasts; with care

he fished out a yellowish flake of them and dropped it into his

new albumenless soup . He put the bottle in his incubating

oven . Would they grow?

That night be turned aver and over in his bed. He whis.

72 PASTEUR

pered his hopes and fears to Madame Pasteur — she couldn't

advise him but she comforted him . She understood every-•

thing but couldn't explain away his worries. She was his per

fect assistant. ...

He was back in his attic next morning not knowing how he

had got up the stairs, not remembering his breakfast — he might

have floated from his bed directly to the rickety dusty in

cubator that held his flask — that fatal flask . He opened the

bottle and put a tiny cloudy drop from it between two thin

bits of glass and slid the specimen under the lens of his micro

scope— and knew the world was his .

“Here they are,” he cried , " lovely budding growing young

yeasts, hundreds of thousands of them - yes, and here are

some of the old ones, the parent yeasts I sowed in the bottle

yesterday . ” He wanted to rush out and tell some one, but he

held himself - he must find out something more — he got some

of the soup from the fatal bottle into a retort, to find out

whether his budding beings had made alcohol. "Liebig is

wrong - albumen isn't necessary — it is yeasts, the growth of

yeasts that ferments sugar.” And he watched trickling tears

of alcohol run down the neck of the retort . He spent the next

weeks in doing the experiment over and over, to be sure that

the yeasts would keep on living, to be certain that they would

keep on making alcohol. He transferred them monotonously,

from one bottle to another — he put then through countless

flasks of this same simple soup of ammonia salt and sugar in

water and always the yeasts budded lustily and filled the bottles

with a foamy collar of carbonic acid gas. Always they made

alcohol! This checking-up of his discoveries was dull work.

There was not the excitement, the sleepless waiting for a

result he hoped for passionately or feared terribly would not

come.

His new fact was old stuff by now but still he kept on, he

cared for his yeasts like some tender father, he fed them

and loved them and was proud of their miraculous work of

turning great quantities of sugar into alcohol. He ruined his

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 73

health watching them and he violated sacred customs of all

good middle - class Frenchmen . He writes of how he sat down

before his lens at seven in the evening -- and this is the dinner

hour of France ! -he sat down to watch and see if he could

spy on his yeasts in the act of budding. "And from that

time, " he writes, “ I did not take my eye from the microscope. ”

It was half past nine before he was satisfied that he had seen

them bud. He made vast crazy tests that lasted from June

until September to find out how long yeasts would keep at

their work of turning sugar into alcohol, and at the end he

cried : “ Give your yeasts enough sugar, and they will not stop

working for three months, or even more !”

Then for a moment the searcher in him changed into a show

man , an exhibitor of stupendous surprises, a missionary in the

cause of microbes. The world must know and the people of

the world must gasp at this astounding news that millions of

gallons of wine in France and boundless oceans of beer in

Germany are not made by men at all but by incessantly toiling

armies of creatures ten -billion times smaller than a wee baby !

He read papers about this and gave speeches and threw his

proofs insolently at the great Liebig's head — and in a little

while a storm was up in the little Republic of Science on the

left bank of the Seine in Paris. His old Professors beamed

pride on him and the Academy of Sciences, which had refused

to elect him a member, now gave him the Prize of Physiology,

and the magnificent Claude Bernard — whom Frenchmen called

Physiology itself - praised him in stately sentences . The next

night, Dumas, his old professor - whose brilliant lectures had

made him cry when he was a green boy in Paris — threw bou

quets at Pasteur in a public speech that would have made

another man than Pasteur bow his head and blush and protest.

Pasteur did not blush — he was perfectly sure that Dumas was

right. Instead he sat down proudly and wrote to his father :

" Mr. Dumas, after praising the so great penetration I had

given proof of ... added : ' The Academy, sir, rewarded you

a few days ago for other profound researches ; your audience

a

O

74 PASTEUR

this evening will applaud you as one of the most distinguished

professors we possess . All that I have underlined was said in

these very words by Mr. Dumas, and was followed by great

applause.”

It is only natural that in the midst of this hurrahing there

was some quiet hissing. Opponents began to rise on all sides.

Pasteur made these enemies not entirely because his discoveries

stepped on the toes of old theories and beliefs . No, his

bristling curious impudent air of challenge got him enemies.

He had a way of putting “ am -I-not-clever -to -have- found- this

and-aren't-all-of-you -fools-not-to -believe-it-at-once" between

the lines of all of his writings and speeches. He loved to fight

with words , he had a cocky eagerness to get into an argument

with every one about anything. He would have sputtered in

dignantly at an innocently intended comment on his grammar

or his punctuation. Look at portraits of him taken at this

time it was 1860 — read his researches, and you will find a

fighting sureness of his perpetual rightness in every hair of

his eyebrow and even in the technical terms and chemical

formulas of his famous scientific papers.

Many people objected to this scornful cockiness — but some

good men of science had better reasons for disagreeing with

him — his experiments were brilliant , they were startling, but

his experiments stopped short of being completely proved .

They had loopholes. Every now and then when he set out

confidently with some of his gray specks of ferment to make

the acid of sour milk, he would find to his disgust a nasty

smell of rancid butter wafting up from his bottles. There

would be no little rods in the flask - alas - and none of the

sour-milk - acid that he had set out to get. These occasional

failures, the absence of sure - fire in these tests gave ammuni

tion to his enemies and brought sleepless nights to Pasteur.

But not for long ! It is not the least strange thing about him

that it didn't seem to matter to him that he never quite solved

this confusing going wrong of his fermentations; he was a

cunning map - instead of butting his head against the wall of

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 75

this problem , he slipped around it and turned it to his great

fame and advantage.

Why this annoying rancid butter smell — why sometimes no

sour-milk -acid ? One morning, in one of his bottles that had

gone bad, he noticed another kind of wee beasts swimming

around among a few of the discouraged dancing rods which

should have been there in great swarms.

“What are these beasts ? They're much bigger than the

rods — they don't merely quiver and vibrate — they actually

swim around like fish ; they must be little animals.”

He watched them peevishly, he had an instinct they had no

business there. There were processions of them hooked to

gether like barges on the River Seine, strings of clumsy barges

that snaked along. Then there were lonely ones that would

perform a stately twirl now and again ; sometimes they would

make a pirouette and balance — the next moment they would

shiver at one end in a curious kind of shimmy. It was all very

interesting, these various pretty cavortings of these new beasts .

But they had no business there! He tried a hundred ways to

keep them out, ways that would seem very clumsy to us now,

but just as he thought he had cleaned them out of all his bot

tles, back they popped. Then one day it flashed over him

that every time that his bottles of soup swarmed with this

gently moving larger sort of animal , these same bottles of

soup had the strong nasty smell of rancid butter.

So he proved , after a fashion, that this new kind of beast

was another kind of ferment, a ferment that made the rancid

butter-acid from sugar ; but he didn't nail down his proof, be

cause he couldn't be sure, absolutely, that there was one kind

and only one kind of beast present in his bottles. While he

was a little confused and uncertain about this, he turned his

troubles once more to his advantage He was peering, one

day, at the rancid butter microbes swarming before his micro

scope. “There's something new here in the middle of the

drop they are lively, going every which way. " Gently, pre

cisely, a little aimlessly, he moved the specimen so that the

76 PASTEUR

edge of the drop was under his lens. ... " But here at the

edge they're not moving, they're lying round stiff as pokers. "

It was so with every specimen he looked at. "Air kills them ,"

he cried, and was sure he had made a great discovery. A little

while afterward he told the Academy proudly that he had not

only discovered a new ferment, a wee animal that had a curious

trick of making stale -butter -acid from sugar, but besides this

he had discovered that these animals could live and play and

move and do their work without any air whatever. Air even

killed them ! “ And this,” he cried, “is the first example of

little animals living without air !”

Unfortunately it was the third example. Two hundred years

before old Leeuwenhoek had seen the same thing. A hundred

years later Spallanzani had been amazed to find that micro

scopic beasts could live without breathing.

Very probably Pasteur didn't know about these discoveries

of the old trail blazers - I am sure he was not trying to steal

their stuff — but as he went up in his excited climb toward

glory and toward always increasing crowds of new discoveries,

he regarded less and less what had been done before him and

what went on around him. He re -discovered the curious fact

that microbes make meat go bad. He failed to give the first

discoverer, Schwann , proper credit for it !

But this strange neglect to give credit for the good work of

others must not be posted too strongly against him in the

Book of St. Peter, because you can see his fine imagination,

that poet's thought of his , making its first attempts at showing

that microbes are the real murderers of the human race. He

dreams in this paper that just as there is putrid meat, so there

are putrid diseases. He tells how he suffered in this work with

meat gone bad ; he tells about the bad smells — and how he

hated bad smells ! —that filled his little laboratory during these

researches : " My researches on the fermentations have led

me naturally toward these studies to which I have resolved to

devote myself without too much thought of their danger or

of the disgust which they inspire in me, " and then he told the

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 77

Academy of the hard job that awaited him ; he explained to

them why he must not shrink from it , by making a graceful

quotation from the great Lavoisier : " Public usefulness and

the interests of humanity ennoble the most disgusting work

and only allow enlightened men to see the zeal which is needed

to overcome obstacles.”

IV

.

L

So he prepared the stage for his dangerous experiments

years before he entered on them. He prepared a public stage

setting. His proposed heroism thrilled the calm men of science

that were his audience. As they returned home through the

gray streets of the ancient Latin Quarter they could imagine

Pasteur bidding them a farewell full of emotion, they could

see him marching with set lips — wanting to hold his nose but

bravely not doing it — into the midst of stinking pestilences

where perilous microbes lay in wait for him. . . . It is so that

Pasteur proved himself much more useful than Leeuwenhoek

or Spallanzani - he did excellent experiments, and then had a

knack of presenting them in a way to heat up the world about

them. Grave men of science grew excited . Simple people saw

clear visions of the yeasts that made the wine that was their

staff of life and they were troubled at nights by thoughts of

hovering invisible putrid microbes in the air. .

He did curious tests that waited three years to be completed.

He took flasks and filled them part way full with milk or urine.

He doused them in boiling water and sealed their slender necks

shut in a blast flame — then for years he guarded them . At

last he opened them, to show that the urine and the milk were

perfectly preserved , that the air above the fluid in the bottles

still had almost all of its oxygen ; no microbes, no destruction

of the milk ! He allowed germs to grow their silent swarms in

other flasks of urine and milk that he had left unboiled, and

when he tested these for oxygen he found that the oxygen had

been completely used up — the microbes had used it to burn up ,

.

1

78 PAS TEUR

to destroy the stuff on which they fed. Then like a great bird

Pasteur spread his wings of fancy and soared up to fearsome

speculations — he imagined a weird world without microbes,

a world whose air had plenty of oxygen , but this oxygen would

be of no use, alas, to destroy dead plants and animals, because

there were no microbes to do the oxidations. His hearers had

nightmare glimpses of vast heaps of carcasses choking de

serted lifeless streets — without microbes life would not be

possible !

Now Pasteur ran hard up against a question that was

bound to pop up and look him in the face sooner or later . It

was an old question . Adam had without doubt asked it of

God, while he wondered where the ten thousand living beings

of the garden of Eden came from. It was the question that

had all thinkers by the ears for a hundred centuries, that had

given Spallanzani so much exciting fun a hundred years be

fore. It was the simple but absolutely insoluble question :

Where do microbes come from ?

" How is it, ” Pasteur's opponents asked him , " how is it that

yeasts appear from nowhere every year of every century in

every corner of the earth, to turn grape juice into wine ?

Where do the little animals come from, these little animals

that turn milk sour in every can and butter rancid in every jar ,

from Greenland to Timbuctoo ? "

Like Spallanzani, Pasteur could not believe that the microbes

rose from the dead stuff of the milk or butter. Surely mi

crobes have to have parents! He was, you see, a good Cath

olic . It is true that he lived among the brainy skeptics on the

left bank of the Seine in Paris, where God is as popular as a

Soviet would be in Wall Street, but the doubts of his colleagues

didn't touch Pasteur. It was beginning to be the fashion of

the doubters to believe in Evolution : the majestic poem that

tells of life, starting as a formless stuff stirring in a steamy

ooze of a million years ago , unfolding through a stately pro

cession of living beings until it gets to monkeys and at last

triumphantly — to men . There doesn't have to be a God to

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 79

start that parade or to run it — it just happened, said the new

philosophers with an air of science.

But Pasteur answered : “My philosophy is of the heart and

not of the mind, and I give myself up, for instance , to those

feelings about eternity that come naturally at the bedside of

a cherished child drawing its last breath . At those supreme

moments there is something in the depths of our souls which

tells us that the world may be more than a mere combination

of events due to a machine-like equilibrium brought out of the

chaos of the elements simply through the gradual action of the

forces of matter.” He was always a good Catholic.

Then Pasteur dropped philosophy and set to work . He

believed that his yeasts and rods and little animals came from

the air - he imagined an air full of these invisible things,

Other microbe hunters had shown there were germs in the air,

but Pasteur made elaborate machines to prove it all over again .

He poked gun cotton into little glass tubes, put a suction pump

on one end of them and stuck the other end out of the window ,

sucked half the air of the garden through the cotton - and

then gravely tried to count the number of living beings in this

cotton . He invented clumsy machines for getting these mi

crobe-loaded bits of cotton into yeast soup, to see whether

the microbes would grow. He did the good old experiment of

Spallanzani over; he got himself a round bottle and put some

yeast soup in it, and sealed off the neck of the bottle in the

stuttering blast lamp flame, then boiled the soup for a few

minutes and no microbes grew in this bottle.

“ But you have heated the air in your flask when you boiled

the yeast soup — what yeast soup needs to generate little ani

mals is natural air - you can't put yeast soup together with

natural unheated air without its giving rise to yeasts or molds

or torulas or vibrions or animalcules !” cried the believers in

spontaneous generation, the evolutionists, the doubting botan

ists, cried all Godless men from their libraries and their arm

chairs. They shouted , but made no experiments.

Pasteur, in a muddle, tried to invent ways of getting un

80 PASTEUR

heated air into a boiled yeast soup — and yet keep it from

swarming with living sub-visible creatures. He fumbled at

getting a way to do this; he muddled - keeping all the time a

brave face toward the princes and professors and publicists

that were now beginning to swarm to watch his miracles. The

authorities had promoted him from his rat- infested attic to a

little building of four or five two -by -four rooms at the gate

of the Normal School. It would not be considered good enough

to house the guinea -pigs of the great Institutes of to -day, but

it was here that Pasteur set out on his famous adventure to

prove that there was nothing to the notion that microbes could

arise without parents. It was an adventure that was part good

experiment, part unseemly scuffle - a scuffle that threatened at

certain hilariously vulgar moments to be settled by a fist fight.

He messed around, I say, and his apparatus kept getting moreI

and more complicated, and his experiments kept getting easier

to object to and less clear, he began to replace his customary

easy experiments that convinced with sledge-hammer force, by

long drools of words. He was stuck.

Then one day old Professor Balard walked into his work

room . Balard had started life as a druggist ; he had been an

owlish original druggist who had amazed the scientific world

by making the discovery of the element bromine, not in a fine

laboratory, but on the prescription counter in the back room of

a drugstore. This had got him fame and his job of professor

of chemistry in Paris. Balard was not ambitious ; he had no

yearning to make all the discoveries in the world — discovering

bromine was enough for one man's lifetime — but Balard did

like to nose around to watch what went on in other laboratories.

“ You say you're stuck, you say you do not see how to get

air and boiled yeast soup together without getting living crea

tures into the yeast soup, my friend? " you can hear the lazy

Balard asking the then confused Pasteur. " Look here , you“ ,

and I both believe there is no such thing as microbes rising in

a yeast soup by themselves—we both believe they fall in or

creep in with the dust of the air , is it not so ? ”

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 81

“ Yes,” answered Pasteur, " but“

“Wait a minute ! ” interrupted Balard . “Why don't you just

try the trick of putting some yeast soup in a bottle, boiling it ,

then fixing the opening so the dust can't fall in . At the same

time the air can get in all it wants to .”

“ But how ? " asked Pasteur.

“ Easy , ” replied the now forgotten Balard . “ Take one of

your round flasks, put the yeast soup into it , then soften the

glass of the flask neck in your blast lamp — and draw the neck

out and downward into a thin little tube - turn this little tube

down the way a swan bends his neck when he's picking some

thing out of the water. Then just leave the end of the tube

open . It's like this _” and Balard sketched a diagram :

Pasteur looked, then

suddenly saw the mag

nificent ingeniousness of

this little experiment.

“Why, then microbes

can't fall into the flask ,

because the dust they

stick to can't very well

fall upward - marvelous!

I see it now ! ”

" Exactly ,” smiled Balard . “Try it and find out if it works

-see you later, ” and he left to continue his genial round of

the laboratories.

Pasteur had bottle washers and assistants now, and he or

dered them to hurry and prepare the flasks. In a moment the

laboratory was buzzing with the stuttering ear-shattering

b-r-r-r-r-r of the enameler's lamps; he fell to work savagely.

He took flasks and put yeast soup into them and then melted

their necks and drew them out and curved them downward

into swan's necks and pigtails and Chinaman's cues and a half

dozen fantastic shapes. Next he boiled the soup in them

that drove out all the air — but as the flasks cooled down new

air came in — unheated air, perfectly clean air.

82 PASTEUR

The flasks ready, Pasteur crawled on his hands and knees,

back and forth with a comical dignity on his hands and knees,

carrying one flask at a time, through a low cubby hole under

the stairs to his incubating oven. Next morning he was first at

the laboratory, and in a jiffy, battered notebook in his hand,

if you had been there you would have seen his rear elevation

disappearing underneath the stairway. Like a beagle to its

rabbit Pasteur was drawn to this oven with its swan neck

flasks. Family, love, breakfast, and the rest of a silly world

no longer existed for him .

Had you still been there a half hour later, you would have

seen him come crawling out, his eyes shining through his fogged

glasses. He had a right to be happy, for every one of the long

twisty necked bottles in which the yeast soup had been boiled

was perfectly clear — there was not a living creature in them .

The next day they remained the same and the next. There

was no doubt now that Balard's scheme had worked . There

was no doubt that spontaneous generation was nonsense .

“What a fine experiment is this experiment of mine — this

proves that you can leave any kind of soup , after you've boiled

it, you can leave it open to the ordinary air, and nothing will

grow in it - so long as the air gets into it through a narrow

twisty tube.”

Balard came back and smiled as Pasteur poured the news

of the experiment over him. “ I thought it would work - you

see, when the air comes back in , as the flask cools, the dusts

and their germs start in through the narrow neck - but they

get caught on the moist walls of the little tube."

“Yes, but how can we prove that? " puzzled Pasteur.

" Just take one of those flasks that has been in your oven

all these days, a flask where no living things have appeared,

and shake that flask so that the soup sloshes over and back

and forth into the swan's neck part of it . Put it back in the

oven, and next morning the soup will be cloudy with thick

swarms of little beasts - children of the ones that were caught

in the neck . "

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 83

Pasteur tried it, and it was so ! A little later at a brilliant

meeting where the brains and wit and art of Paris fought to

get in , Pasteur told of his swan neck flask experiment in rap

turous words. "Never will the doctrine of Spontaneous Gen

eration recover from the mortal blow that this simple experi

ment has dealt it, ” he shouted. If Balard was there you may

be sure he applauded as enthusiastically as the rest. A rare

soul was Balard.

Then Pasteur invented an experiment that was so far as

one can tell from a careful search through the records — really

his own. It was a grand experiment, a semi-public experi

ment, an experiment that meant rushing across France in

trains, it was a test in which he had to slither around on

glaciers. Once more his laboratory became a shambles of

cluttered flasks and hurrying assistants and tinkling glassware

and sputtering, bubbling pots of yeast soup . Pasteur and his

enthusiastic slaves — they were more like fanatic monks than

slaves — were getting ready hundreds of round bellied bottles.

They filled each one of them part full of yeast soup and then ,

during many hours that shot by like moments — such was

their excitement — they doused each bottle for a few minutes in

boiling water. And while the soup was boiling they drew the

flask necks out in a spitting blue flame until they were sealed

shut. Each one of this regiment of bottles held boiled yeast

soupand a vacuum.

Armed with these dozens of flasks, and fussing about them .

Pasteur started on his travels. He went down first into the

dank cellars of the Observatory of Paris, that famous Ob

servatory where worked the great Le Verrier, who had done

the proud feat of prophesying the existence of the planet Nep

tune. "Here the air is so still , so calm ,” said Pasteur to his

boys, "that there will be hardly any dust in it , and almost no

microbes. " Then, holding the flasks far away from their”

bodies, using forceps that had been heated red hot in a flame,

they cracked the necks of ten of the flasks in succession ; as

the neck came off each one, there was a hissing " S-S -S-s” of

84 PASTEUR

air rushing in. At once they sealed the bottles shut again in

the flickering flame of an alcohol lamp. They did the same

stunt in the yard of the observatory with another ten bottles,

then hurried back to the little laboratory to crawl under the

stairs to put the bottles in the incubating oven.

A few days later Pasteur might have been seen squatting

before his oven, handling his rows of flasks lovingly, laughing

his triumph with one of those extremely rare laughs of his

he only laughed when he found out he was right. He put down

tiny scrawls in his notebook , and then crawled out of his

cubby -hole to tell his assistants : “ Nine out of ten of the bot

tles we opened in the cellar of the Observatory are perfectly

clear - not a single germ got into them. All the bottles we

opened in the yard are cloudy - swarming with living creatures .

It's the air that sucks them into the yeast soup — it's the dust

of the air they come in with !”

He gathered up the rest of the bottles and hurried to the

train - it was the time of the summer vacation when other

professors were resting — and he went to his old home in the

Jura mountains and climbed the hill of Poupet and opened

twenty bottles there. He went to Switzerland and perilously

let the air hiss into twenty flasks on the slopes of Mont Blanc ;

and found, as he had hoped, that the higher he went, the fewer

were the flasks of yeast soup that became cloudy with swarms

of microbes. “ That is as it ought to be, ” he cried, " the higher

and clearer the air , the less dust - and the fewer the microbes

that always stick to particles of the dust.” He came back

proudly to Paris and told the Academy - with proofs that

would astonish everybody ! —that it was now sure that air

alone could never cause living things to rise in yeast soup .

" Here are germs, right beside them there are none, a little

further on there are different ones . . . and here where the

air is perfectly calm there are none at all , ” he cried. Then

once more he set a new stage for possible magnificent ex

ploits : " I would have liked to have gone up in a balloon to

open my bottles still higher up !” But he didn't go up in that

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 85

balloon, for his hearers were already sufficiently astonished .

Already they considered him to be more than a man of science;

he became for them a composer of epic searchings, a Ulysses

of microbe hunters the first adventurer of that heroic age

to which you will soon come in this story.

Many times Pasteur won his arguments by brilliant experi

ments that simply foored every one, but sometimes his victories

were due to the weakness or silliness of his opponents, and

again they were the result of - luck . Before a society of chem

ists Pasteur had insulted the scientific ability of naturalists;

he was astonished, he shouted , that naturalists didn't stretch

out a hand to the real way of doing science that is, to experi

ments. “ I am of the persuasion that that would put a new sap

into their science, ” he said . You can imagine how the natural

ists liked that kind of talk ; particularly Mr. Pouchet, director

of the Museum of Rouen, did not like it and he was enthusias

tically joined in not liking it by Professor Joly and Mr. Mus

set, famous naturalists of the College of Toulouse. Nothing

could convince these enemies of Pasteur that microscopic

beasts did not come to life without parents . They were sure

there was such a thing as life arising spontaneously ; they de

cided to beat Pasteur on his own ground at his own game.

Like Pasteur they filled up some flasks, but unlike him they

used a soup of hay instead of yeast, they made a vacuum in

their bottles and hastened to high Maladetta in the Pyrenees,

and they kept climbing until they had got up many feet higher

than Pasteur had been on Mont Blanc. Here, beaten upon by

nasty breezes that howled out of the caverns of the glaciers

and sneaked through the thick linings of their coats, they

opened their flasks — Mr. Joly almost slid off the edge of the

ledge and was only saved from a scientific martyr's death when

2 guide grabbed him by the coat tail! Out of breath and

chilled through and through they staggered back to a little

tavern and put their flasks in an improvised incubating oven

and in a few days, to their joy, they found every one of their

bottles swarming with little creatures. Pasteur was wrong !

a

86 PASTEUR

Now the fight was on . Pasteur became publicly sarcastic

about the experiments of Pouchet, Joly and Musset; he made

criticisms that to - day we know are quibbles. Pouchet came

back with the remark that Pasteur " had presented his own

flasks as an ultimatum to science to astonish everybody.” Pas

teur was furious, denounced Pouchet as a liar and bawled for a

public apology. It seemed, alas, as if the truth were going to

be decided by the spilling of blood, instead of by calm experi

ment. Then Pouchet and Joly and Musset challenged Pasteur

to a public experiment before the Academy of Sciences, and

they said that if one single flask would fail to grow microbes

after it had been opened for an instant, they would admit they

were wrong. The fatal day for the tests dawned at last — what

an interesting day it would have been — but at the last moment

Pasteur's enemies backed down. Pasteur did his experiments

before the Commission - he did them confidently with ironical

remarks and a little while later the Commission announced :

“The facts observed by Mr. Pasteur and contested by Messrs.

Pouchet, Joly and Musset, are of the most perfect exactitude.”

Luckily for Pasteur, but alas for Truth , both sides happened

to be right . Pouchet and his friends had used hay instead of

yeast soup, and a great Englishman, Tyndall, found out years

later that hay holds wee stubborn seeds of microbes that will

stand boiling for hours ! It was really Tyndall that finally set

tled this great quarrel ; it was Tyndall that proved Pasteur was

right.

V

Pasteur was now presented to the Emperor Napoleon III,

He told that dreamy gentleman that his whole ambition was to

find the microbes that he was sure must be the cause of disease.

He was invited to an imperial house party at Compiègne,

The guests were commanded to get ready to go hunting, but

Pasteur begged to be excused ; he had had a dray load of ap

paratus sent up from Paris—though he was only staying at the

palace for a week ! -and he impressed their Imperial Majes.

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 87

ties enormously by bending over his microscope while every

body else was occupied with frivolous and gay amusements .

The world must know that microbes have got to have par

ents! 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 pesti

lences ! ” 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 hewas obsessed with dust. At dinner, even at the smart

est 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 ex

cited about Pasteur and his microbes. Whisperings of mysteri

ous and marvelous events seeped through the gates of the Nor

mal School. Students, even professors, passed the laboratory

a little atremble with awe. One student might be heard remark

ing to another, as they passed the high gray walls of the Nor.

mal 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 ;

.

88 PASTEUR

his students shed tears of emotion at the fiery eloquence of his

lectures. He talked about microbes causing disease long be

fore he knew anything about whether or not they caused dis

ease 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 mean

ingly 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 woolgathering searcher, much more than a mere man of

science.

Once more he started out to show all of France how science

could save money for her industry ; he packed up boxes of

glassware and an eager assistant, Duclaux, and bustled off to

Arbois, his old home - he hurried off up there to study the dis

eases of wine — to save the imperiled wine industry . He set up

his laboratory in what had been an old café and instead of gas

burners he had to be satisfied with an open charcoal brazier

that the enthusiastic Duclaux kept glowing with a pair of bel

lows ; from time to time Duclaux would scamper across to the

town pump for water ; their clumsy apparatus was made by

the village carpenter and tinsmith . Pasteur rushed around to

his friends of long ago and begged bottles of wine, bitter wine,

ropy wine, oily wine ; he knew from his old researches that it

was yeasts that changed grapejuice into wine - he felt certain

that it must be some other wee microscopic being that made

wines go bad.

Sure enough! When he turned his lens on to ropy wines he

found them swarming with very tiny curious microbes hitched

together like strings of beads ; he found the bottles of bitter

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 89

wine infested with another kind of beast and the kegs of turned

wine by still another. Then he called the winegrowers and the

merchants of the region together and proceeded to show them

magic .

“Bring me a half dozen bottles of wine that has gone bad

with different sicknesses,” he asked them . “ Do not tell me

what is wrong with them, and I'll tell you what ails them

without tasting them .” The winegrowers didn't believe

him ; among each other they snickered at him as they went to

fetch the bottles of sick wine; they laughed at the fantastic

machinery in the old café; they took Pasteur for some kind of

earnest lunatic . They planned to fool him and brought him

bottles of perfectly good wine among the sick ones. Then he

set about flabbergasting them ! With a slender glass tube he

sucked a drop of wine out of a bottle and put it between two

little slips of glass before his microscope. The wine raisers

nudged each other and winked French winks of humorous com

mon sense, while Pasteur sat hunched over his microscope,

and they became more merry as minutes passed.

Suddenly he looked at them and said : “ There is nothing the

matter with this wine - give it to the taster- let him see if I'm

right.”

The taster did his tasting, then puckered up his purple nose

and admitted that Pasteur was correct ; and so it went through

a long row of bottles — when Pasteur looked up from his micro

scopes and prophesied : “ Bitter wine” -it turned out to be bit

ter ; and when he foretold that the next sample was ropy , the

taster acknowledged that ropy was right !

The wine raisers mumbled their thanks and lifted their hats

to him as they left. " We don't get the way he does this—but

he is a very clever man, very , very clever, ” they muttered .

That is much for a peasant Frenchman to admit..

When they left, Pasteur and Duclaux worked triumphantly

in their tumbledown laboratory ; they tackled the question of

how to keep these microbes out of healthy wines—they found

at last that if you heat wine just after it has finished ferment

.

90 PASTEUR

ing, even if you heat it gently, way below the point of boiling,

the microbes that have no business in the wine will be killed

and the wine will not become sick. That little trick is now

known to everybody by the name of pasteurization.

Now that people of the East of France had been shown how

to keep their wine from going bad, the people of the middle of

France clamored for Pasteur to come and save their vinegar

making industry . So he rushed down to Tours. He had got

used to looking for microscopic beings in all kinds of things by

now - he no longer groped as he had had to do at first; he ap

proached the vinegar kegs, where wine was turning itself into

vinegar, he saw a peculiar-looking scum on the surface of the

liquor in the barrels. “ That scum has to be there, otherwise

we get no vinegar," explained the manufacturers. In a few

weeks of swift, sure - fingered investigation that astonished the

vinegar-makers and their wives, Pasteur found that the scum

on the kegs was nothing more nor less than billions upon bil

lions of microscopic creatures. He took off great sheets of this

scum and tested it and weighed it and fussed with it, and at

last he told an audience of vinegar-makers and their wives and

families that the microbes which change wine to vinegar actu

ally eat up and turn into vinegar ten thousand times their own

weight of alcohol in a few days. What gigantic things these

infinitely tiny beings can do — think of a man of two hundred

pounds chopping two millions of pounds of wood in four days !

It was by some such homely comparison as this one that he

made microbes part of these humble people's lives, it was so

that he made them respect these miserably small creatures; it

was by pondering on their fiendish capacity for work that

Pasteur himself got used to the idea that there was nothing so

strange about a tiny beast, no larger than the microbe of

vinegar, getting into an ox or an elephant or a man — and doing

him to death . Before he left them he showed the people of

Tours how to cultivate and care for those useful wee creatures

that so strangely added oxygen to wine to turn it into vinegar

-and millions of francs for them .

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 91

These successes made Pasteur drunk with confidence in his

method of experiment; he began to dream impossible gaudy

dreams of immense discoveries and super-Napoleonic microbe

huntings — and he did more than brood alone over these

dreams; he put them into speeches and preached them . He be

came, in a word, a new John the Baptist of the religion of the

Germ Theory, but unlike the unlucky Baptist, Pasteur was a

forerunner who lived to see at least some of his prophecies come

true .

Then for a short time he worked quietly in his laboratory in

Paris — there was nothing for him to save just then — until one

day in 1865 Fate came to his door and knocked . Fate in the

guise of his old professor, Dumas, called on him and asked him

to change himself from a man of science into a silkworm doc

tor. “ What's wrong with silkworms ? I did not know that

they ever had diseases — I know nothing at all about silk

worms— what's more, I have never even seen one !” protested

Pasteur .

VI

"The silk country of the South is my native country , " an

swered Dumas. “ I've just come back from there — it is terrible

-I cannot sleep nights for thinking of it, my poor country,

my village of Alais . . . . This country that used to be rich,

that used to be gay with mulberry trees which my people used

to call the Golden Tree — this country is desolate now. The

lovely terraces are going to ruin — the people, they are my

people, they are starving. ..." Tears were in his voice.

Anything but a respecter of persons, Pasteur who loved and

respected himself above all men , had always kept a touching

• reverence for Dumas. He must help his sad old professor !

But how? It is doubtful at this time if Pasteur could have

told a silkworm from an angle worm ! Indeed, a little later,

when he was first given a cocoon to examine, he held it up to

his ear, shook it, and cried : “ Why, there is something inside

92 PASTEUR

a

it !” Pasteur hated to go South to try to find out what ailed

silkworms, he knew he risked a horrid failure by going and he

detested failure above everything. But it is one of the charm

ing things about him that in the midst of all his arrogance , his

vulgar sureness of himself, he had kept that boyish love and

reverence for his old master - so he said to Dumas : " I am in

your hands, I'm at your disposal, do with me as you wish - I

will go !”

So he went. He packed up the never complaining Madame

Pasteur and the children and a microscope and three energetic

and worshiping young assistants and he went into the epidemic

that was slaughtering millions of silkworms and ruining the

South of France. Knowing less of silkworms and their sick

nesses than a babe in swaddling clothes he arrived in Alais ; he

got there and he learned that a silkworm spins a cocoon round

itself and turns into a chrysalid inside the cocoon ; he found

out that the chrysalid changes into a moth that climbs out anda

lays eggs — which hatch out the next spring into new broods of

young silkworms. The silkworm growers — disgusted at his

great ignorance - told him that the disease which was killing

their worms was called pébrine, because the sick worms were

covered with little black spots that looked like pepper. Pas,

teur found out that there were a thousand or so theories about

the sickness, but that the little pepper spots — and the curious

little globules inside the sick worms, wee globules that you

could only see with a microscope - were the only facts that were

known about it.

Then Pasteur unlimbered his microscope, before he had got

his family settled - he was like one of those trout fishing

maniacs who starts to cast without thought of securing his

canoe safely on the bank — he unlimbered his microscope, I

say, and began to peer at the insides of sick worms, and

particularly at these wce globules. Quickly he concluded that

the globules were a sure sign of the disease . Fifteen days after

he had come to Alais he called the Agricultural Committee to

gether and told them : “ At the moment of egg-laying put aside

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 93

each couple of moths, the father and the mother. Let them

mate ; let the mother lay her eggs — then pin the father and

mother moths Jown onto a little board, slit open their bellies

and take out a little of the fatty tissue under their skin ; put

this under a microscope and look for those tiny globules . If

you can't find any, you can be sure the eggs are sound - you

can use those eggs for new silkworms in the spring."

The committee looked at the shining microscope. “We

farmers can't run a machine like that, ” they objected. They

were suspicious, they didn't believe in this newfangled ma

chine. Then the salesman that was in Pasteur came to the

front. " Nonsense !” he answered. “There is an eight -year -old

girl in my laboratory who handles this microscope easily and is

perfectly able to spot these little globules — these corpuscles

and then you grown men try to tell me you couldn't learn to use

a microscope!” So he shamed them . And the committee

obediently bought microscopes and tried to follow his direc

tions. Then Pasteur started a hectic life ; he was everywhere

around the tragic silk country, lecturing, asking innumerable

questions, teaching the farmers to use microscopes, rushing

back to the laboratory to direct his assistants — he directed

them to do complicated experiments that he hadn't time to do,

or even watch, himself — and in the evenings he dictated an

swers to letters and scientific papers and speeches to Madame

Pasteur. The next morning he was off again to the neighbor

ing towns, cheering up despairing farmers and haranguing

them . ..

But the next spring his bubble burst, alas. The next spring,,

when it came time for the worms to climb their mulberry twigs

to spin their silk cocoons, there was a horrible disaster. His

confident prophecy to the farmers did not come true. These

honest people glued their eyes to their microscopes to pick out

the healthy moths, so as to get healthy eggs, eggs without the

evil globules in them - and these supposed healthy eggs hatched

worins, sad to tell, who grew miserably, languid worms who

would not eat, strange worms who failed to molt, sick worms>

94 PASTEUR

who shriveled up and died, lazy worms who hung around at

the bottoms of their twigs, not caring whether there was ever

another silk stocking on the leg of any fine lady in the world .

Poor Pasteur ! He had been so busy trying to save the silk

worm industry that he hadn't taken time to find out what really

ailed the silkworms. Glory had seduced him into becoming a

mere savior — for a moment he forgot that Truth is a will of

the wisp that can only be caught in the net of glory -scorning

patient experiment. ...

Some silkworm raisers laughed despairing laughs at him

others attacked him bitterly ; dark days were on him . He

worked the harder for them , but he couldn't find bottom. He

came on broods of silkworms who fairly galloped up the twigs

and proceeded to spin elegant cocoons — then at the microscope

he found these beasts swarming with the tiny globules. He

discovered other broods that sulked on their branches and

melted away with a gassy diarrhea and died miserably — but in

these he could find no globules whatever. He became com

pletely mixed up ; he began to doubt whether the globules had

anything to do with the disease . Then to make things worse ,

mice got into the broods of his experimental worms and made

cheerful meals on them and poor Duclaux, Maillot and Gernez

had to stay up by turns all night to catch the raiding mice ;

next morning everybody would be just started working when

black clouds appeared in the West, and all of them — Madame

Pasteur and the children bringing up the rear — had to scurry

out to cover up the mulberry trees . In the evenings Pasteur

had to settle his tired back in an armchair, to dictate answers

to peeved silkworm growers who had lost everything - using his

method of sorting eggs.

After a series of such weary months, his instinct to do experi

ments, this instinct — and the Goddess of Chance - came to

gether to save him. He pondered to himself : " I've at least man

aged to scrape together a few broods of healthy worms— if I

feed these worms mulberry leaves smeared with the discharges

of sick worms, will the healthy worms die ? ” He tried it, and

a

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 95

-

the healthy worms died sure enough, but, confound it . the ex

periment was a fizzle again — for instead of getting covered with

pepper spots and dying slowly in twenty - five days or so, as

worms always do of pébrine - the worms of his experiment

curled up and passed away in seventy -two hours. He was dis

couraged , he stopped his experiments; his faithful assistants

worried about him — why didn't he try the experiment over?

At last Gernez went off to the north to study the silk worms

of Valenciennes, and Pasteur, not clearly knowing the reason

why, wrote to him and asked him to do that feeding experiment

up there. Gernez had some nice broods of healthy worms.

Gernez was sure in his own head - no matter what his chief

might think - that the wee globules were really living things,

parasites, assassins of the silkworm. He took forty healthy

worms and fed them on good healthy mulberry leaves that had

never been fed on by sick beasts. These worms proceeded to

spin twenty -seven good cocoons and there were no globules in

the moths that came from them . He smeared some other

leaves with crushed - up sick moths and fed them to some day

old worms— and these worms wasted away to a slow death ,

they became covered with pepper spots and their bodies

swarmed with the sub-visible globules. He took some more

leaves with crushed -up sick moths and fed these to some old

worms just ready to spin cocoons ; the worms lived to spin the

cocoons, but the moths that came out of the cocoons were loaded

with the globules, and the worms from their eggs came to noth

ing. Gernez was excited — and he became more excited when

still nights at his microscope showed him that the globules in

creased tremendously as the worms faded to their deaths. ...

Gernez hurried to Pasteur. " It is solved,” he cried , "the"

little globules are alive — they are parasites !—They are what

make the worms sick ! "

It was six months before Pasteur was convinced that Ger

nez was right , but when at last he understood, he swooped back

on his work, and once more called the Committee together.

“The little corpuscles are not only a sign of the disease, they

96 PAS TEUR

are its cause. These globules are alive , they multiply, they

force themselves into every part of the moth's body. Where

we made our mistake was to examine only a little part of the

moth, we only looked under the skin of the moth's belly—

we've got to grind up the whole beast and examine all of it.

Then if we do not find the globules we can safely use the eggs

for next year's worms!”

The committee tried the new scheme and it worked — the next

year they had fine worms that gave them splendid yields of

silk .

Pasteur saw now that the little globule, the cause of the pé

brine, came from outside the worm - it did not rise by itself

inside the worm - and he went everywhere, showing the farm

ers how to keep their healthy worms away from all contact

with leaves that sick worms had soiled. Then suddenly he fell

a victim of a hemorrhage of the brain - he nearly died, but

when he heard that work of building his new laboratory had

been stopped, frugally stopped in expectation of his death , he

was furious and made up his mind to live. He was paralyzed

on one side after that — he never got over it — but he earnestly

read Dr. Smiles' book, "Self Help," and vigorously decided to

work in spite of his handicap. At a time when he should have

stayed in his bed, or have gone to the seaside, he staggered to

his feet and limped to the train for the South , exclaiming in

dignantly that it would be criminal not to finish saving the silk

worms while so many poor people were starving ! All French

men, excepting a few nasty fellows who called it a magnificent

gesture, joined in praising him and adoring him.

For six years Pasteur struggled with the diseases of silk

worms. He had no sooner settled pébrine than another mal

ady of these unhappy beasts popped up, but he knew his prob

lem and found the microbe of this new disease much more

quickly. Tears of joy were in the voice of old Dumas now as

he thanked his dear Pasteur—and the mayor of the town of

Alais talked enthusiastically of raising a golden statue to the

great Pasteur.

MICROBES ARE A MENACE !

9 7

VII

He was forty - five. He wallowed in this glory for a moment,

and then - having saved the silkworm industry, with the help of

God and Gernez - he raised his eyes toward one of those bright,

impossible, but always partly true visions that it was his poet's

gift to see. He raised his artist's eyes from the sicknesses of

silkworms to the sorrows of men, he sounded a trumpet call of

hope to suffering mankind

" It is in the power of man to make parasitic maladies dis

appear from the face of the globe, if the doctrine of sponta

neous generation is wrong, as I am sure it is.”

The siege of Paris in the bitter winter of 1870 had driven

him from his work to his old home in the Jura hills. He wan

dered pitifully around battlefields looking for his son who was

a sergeant. Here he worked himself up into a tremendous

hate, a hate that never left him, of all things German ; he be

came a professional patriot. “Every one of my works will bear

on its title page, 'Hatred to Prussia. Revenge ! Revenge !! ”' "

he shrieked , good loyal Frenchman that he was. Then with a

magnificent silliness he proceeded to make his next research a

revenge research. Even he had to admit that French beer was

much inferior to the beer of the Germans. Well - he would

make the beer of France better than the beer of Germany – he

must make the French beer the peer of beers, no, the emperor

of all beers of the world !

He embarked on vast voyages to the great breweries of

France and here he questioned everybody from the brewmaster

in his studio to the lowest workman that cleaned out the vats .

He journeyed to England and gave advice to those red-faced

artists who made English porter and to the brewers of the

divine ale of Bass and Burton . He trained his microscope on

the must of a thousand beer vats to watch the yeast globules

at their work of budding and making alcohol. Sometimes he

discovered the same kind of miserable sub-visible beings that

he had found in sick wines years before, and he told the brew

98 PA ST EU R

ers that if they would heat their beer, they would keep these

invaders out ; he assured them that then they would be able to

ship their beer long distances , that then they would be able to

brew the most incredibly marvelous of all beers ! He begged

money for his laboratory from brewers, explaining to them how

they would be repaid a thousand fold, and with this money he

turned his old laboratory at the Normal School into a small

scientific brewery that glittered with handsome copper vats

and burnished kettles .

But in the midst of all this feverish work, alas, Pasteur grew

sick of working on beer. He hated the taste of beer just as he

loathed the smell of tobacco smoke; to his disgust he found

that he would have to become a good beer-taster in order to

become a great beer-scientist , to his dismay he discovered that

there was much more to the art of brewing than simply keep

ing vicious invading microbes out of beer vats. He puckered

his snub nose and buried his serious mustache in foamy mugs

and guzzled determined draughts of the product of his pretty

kettles — but he detested this beer, even good beer, in fact all

beer. Bertin, the physics professor, his old friend, smacked

his lips and laughed at him as he swallowed great gulps of

beer that Pasteur had denounced as worthless . Even the young

assistants snickered-but never to his face. Pasteur, most ver

satile of men , was after all not a god. He was an investigator

and a marvelous missionary — but beer-loving is a gift that is

born in a limited number of connoisseurs , just as the ear for

telling good music from trash is born in some men !

Pasteur did help the French beer industry. For that we

have the testimony of the good brewers themselves. It is my

duty to doubt, however, the claims of those idolizers of his who

insist that he made French the equal of German beer. I do not

deny this claim , but I beg that it be submitted to a commission ,

one of those solemn impartial international commissions, the

kind of commission that Pasteur himself so often demanded to

decide before all the world whether he or his detested oppo .

nents were in the right.

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 99

Pasteur's life was becoming more and more unlike the aus

tere cloistered existence that most men of science lead. His

experiments became powerful answers to the objections that

swarmed on every side against his theory of germs, they be- .

came loud public answers to such objections — rather than calm

quests after facts ; but in spite of his dragging science into the

market place, there is no doubt that his experiments were mar

velously made, that they fired the hopes and the imagination

of the world . He got himself into a noisy argument on the way

yeasts turn grape juice into wine, with two French naturalists ,

Frémy and Trécul. Frémy admitted that yeasts were needed

to make alcohol from grape juice, but he argued ignorantly be

fore the amused Academy that yeasts were spontaneously gen

erated inside of grapes. The wise men of the Academy pooh

poohed ; they were amused , all except Pasteur.

“So Frémy says that yeasts rise by themselves inside the

grape!” cried Pasteur. “ Well, let him answer this experiment

then ! ” He took a great number of

round- bellied flasks and filled them part

full of grape juice. He drew each one

out into a swan's neck ; then he boiled

the grape juice in all of them for a few

minutes and for days and weeks this

grape juice, in every one of all these

flasks, showed no bubbles, no yeasts,

there was no fermentation in them .

Then Pasteur went to a vineyard and

gathered a few grapes — they were just

ripe — and with a pure water he washed

the outsides of them with a clean,

heated, badger hairbrush. He put a drop of the wash water

under his lens — sure enough !—there were globules, a few wee

globes, of yeasts. Then he took ten of his swan neck flasks

and ingeniously sealed straight tubes of glass into their sides ,

and through these straight tubes in each one he put a drop of

this wash water from the ripe grapes. Presto ! Every one of

100 PASTEUR

these ten flasks was filled to the neck in a few days with the

pink foam of a good fermentation . There was a little of the

wash water left; he boiled that and put drops of this through

the straight tubes of ten more flasks. " Just so !” he cried a few

days later, " there's no fermentation in these flasks, the boiling

has killed the yeasts in the wash water."

" 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 ani

mal's blood or urine. All microbes have to get in from the out

side ! That settles Frémy.” Then you can fancy him whisper

ing 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 fantas

tic dreams of wiping out disease. He had just received a wor

shiping 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 in

fection 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

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! IOI

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 hu

manity 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 pub

lished 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

niark of true theories is their fruitfulness. This is the charac

teristic which Mr. Balard, with an entirely fatherly friendli

ness, has made stand out in speaking of my researches. ”

Frémy had no more to say .

All Europe by now was in a furor about microbes, and he

knew it was himself that had changed microbes from play

things into useful helpers of mankind — and perhaps, the world

would soon be astounded by it - into dread infinitesimal ogres

and murdering marauders, the worst enemies of the race. He

had become the first citizen of France and even in Denmark

prominent brewers were having his bust put in their labora

tories. When suddenly Claude Bernard died, and some of Ber

nard's friends published this great man's unfinished work .

Horrible to tell , this unfinished work had for its subject

fermentation of grape juice into wine, and it ended by showing

that the whole theory of Pasteur was destroyed because ...

and Bernard closed by giving a series of reasons.

Pasteur could not believe his eyes . Bernard had done this,

the great Bernard who had been his seatmate in the Academy

and had always praised his work ; Bernard who had exchanged

sly sarcastic remarks with him at the Academy of Medicine

about those blue-coated pompous brass - buttoned doctors whose

102 PASTEUR

L

talk was keeping real experiment out of medicine. “ It's bad

enough for these doctors and these half-witted naturalists to

contradict me— but truly great men have always appreciated

my work — and now Bernard ..." you can hear him mutter-

ing.

Pasteur was overwhelmed , but only for a moment. He de

manded Bernard's original manuscript. They gave it to him.

He studied it with all the close attention in his power. He

found Bernard's experiments were only beginnings, rough

sketches; gleefully he found that Bernard's friends who had

published it had made some discreet changes to make it read

better. Then he rose one day, to the scandal of the entire

Academy and the shocked horror of all the great men of

France, and bitterly scolded Bernard's friends for publishing a

research that had dared to question his own theories. Vul

garly he shouted objections at Bernard — who, after all, could

not answer Pasteur from his grave. Then he published a

pamphlet against his old dead friend's last researches. It was

a pamphlet in the worst of taste, accusing Bernard of having

lost his memory. That pamphlet even claimed that Bernard ,

who was to his finger tips a hard man of science, had become

tainted with mystical ideas by associating too much with literary

lights of the French Academy. It even proved that in his last

researches Bernard couldn't see well any more— " I'll wager

he had become farsighted and could not see the yeasts !”

cried Pasteur. Vulgarly, by all this criticism , he left people

to conclude that Bernard had been in his dotage when he

did his last work — without any sense of the fitness of things

this passionate Pasteur jumped up and down on Bernard's

grave .

Finally he argued with Bernard by beautiful experiments a

thing most other men would have done without making un

seemly remarks. Like an American about to build a skyscraper

in six weeks he rushed to carpenters and hardware stores and

bought huge pieces of expensive glass and with this glass he

had the carpenters build ingenious portable hothouses. His

MICROBES ARE A MENACE ! 103

assistants worked dinnerless and sleepless, preparing flasks and

microscopes and wads of heated cotton ; and in an unbelievably

short time Pasteur gathered up all this ponderous paraphernalia

and hastened to catch a train for his old home in the Jura

mountains. Like the so typical misplaced American that he

really was, he threw every consideration and all other work to

the winds and went directly to the point of settling: “ Does my

theory of fermentation hold ? "

Coming to his own little vineyard in Arbois, he hastily put

up his hothouses around a part of his grape- vines. They were

admirable close - fitting hothouses that sealed the grape-vines

from the outside air. " It's midsummer, now , the grapes are

far from ripe,” he pondered, “ and I know that at this time there

are never any yeasts to be found on the grapes.” Then, to

make doubly sure that no yeasts from the air could fall on the

grapes, he carefully wrapped wads of cotton - which his as

sistants had heated to kill all living beings — around some of

the bunches under the glass of the hothouses. He hurried

back to Paris and waited nervously for the grapes to ripen .

He went back to Arbois too soon in his frantic eagerness to

prove that Bernard was wrong — but at last he got there to find

them ripe. He examined the hothouse grapes with his micro

scope; there was not a yeast to be found on their skins. Fever

ishly he crushed some of them up in carefully heated bottles

not a single bubble of fermentation rose in these flasks — and

when he did the same thing to the exposed grapes from the

vines outside the hothouse, these bubbled quickly into wine !

At last he gathered up Madame Pasteur and some of the vines

with their cotton -wrapped bunches of grapes — he was going

to take these back to the Academy, where he would offer a

bunch to each member that wanted one, and he was going to

challenge everybody to try to make wine from these protected

bunches. . . . He knew they couldn't do it without putting

yeasts into them. He would show them all Bernard was

wrong! Madame Pasteur sat stiffly in the train all the way

back to Paris, carefully holding the twigs straight up in front

.

104 PASTEUR

. .

of her so that the cotton wrappings wouldn't come undone. It

was a whole day's trip to Paris. .

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 ex

periments, not a speck of soil which was not capable of fer

menting 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

someglass. ..

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 king,

dom 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 astonish

ing 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. Conscien

tiously 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.

Koch wanted to be an explorer ; or to be a military surgeona

and win Iron Crosses ; or to be ship's doctor and voyage to

impossible places. But alas, when he graduated from the

medical college in 1866 he became an interne in a not very in

teresting insane asylum in Hamburg. Here, busy with raving

maniacs and helpless idiots, the echoes of Pasteur's prophecies

that there were such things as terrible man -killing microbes

hardly reached Koch's ears . He was still listening for steamer

whistles and in the evenings he took walks down by the

wharves with Emmy Fraatz ; he begged her to marry him ; he

held out the bait of romantic trips around the world to her.

Emmy told Robert that she would marry him, but on condi

tion that he forget this nonsense about an adventurous life,

1C5

106 KOCH

provided that he would settle down to be a practicing doctor,

a good useful citizen , in Germany.

Koch listened to Emmy - for a moment the allure of fifty

years of bliss with her chased away his dreams of elephants

and Patagonia - and he settled down to practice medicine ; he

began what was to him a totally uninteresting practice of medi

cine in a succession of unromantic Prussian villages .

Just now , while Koch wrote prescriptions and rode horse

back through the mud and waited up nights for Prussian

farmer women to have their babies, Lister in Scotland was

beginning to save the lives of women in childbirth - by keep

ing microbes away from them. The professors and the stu

dents of the medical colleges of Europe were beginning to be

excited and to quarrel about Pasteur's theory of malignant

microbes, here and there men were trying crude experiments,

but Koch was almost as completely cut off from this world

of science as old Leeuwenhoek had been , two hundred years

before, when he first fumbled at grinding glass into lenses in

Delft in Holland. It looked as if his fate was to be the con

soling of sick people and the beneficent and praiseworthy at

tempt to save the lives of dying people mostly , of course, he

did not save them — and his wife Emmy was quite satisfied

with this and was proud when Koch earned five dollars and

forty - five cents on especially busy days.

But Robert Koch was restless. He trekked from one

deadly village to another still more uninteresting, until at last

he came to Wollstein , in East Prussia , and here, on his twenty

eighth birthday, Mrs. Koch bought him a microscope to play

with .

You can hear the good woman say : "Maybe that will take

Robert's mind off what he calls his stupid practice . . . per

haps this will satisfy him a little . . . he's always looking at

everything with his old magnifying glass .

Alas for her, this new microscope, this plaything, took her

husband on more curious adventures than any he would have

met in Tahiti or Lahore ; and these weird experiences — that

THE DEATH FIGHTER 107

.

. .

Pasteur had dreamed of but which no man had ever had be

forecame on him out of the dead carcasses of sheep and

cows. These new sights and adventures jumped at him im

possibly on his very doorstep , and in his own drug -reeking

office that he was so tired of, that he was beginning to loathe.

" I hate this bluff that my medical practice is ... it isn't

because I do not want to save babies from diphtheria ..but

mothers come to me crying — asking me to save their babies

—and what can I do ?-Grope . . . fumble . reassure

them when I know there is no hope. . How can I cure

diphtheria when I do not even know what causes it , when the

wisest doctor in Germany doesn't know ? ..." So you can

imagine Koch complaining bitterly to Emmy, who was irritated

and puzzled , and thought that it was a young doctor's busi

ness to do as well as he could with the great deal of knowledge

that he had got at the medical school - oh ! would he never be

satisfied ?

But Koch was right. What, indeed, did doctors know about

the mysterious causes of disease ? Pasteur's experiments were

brilliant, but they had proved nothing about the how and why

of human sicknesses. Pasteur was a trail-blazer, a fore-runner

crying possible future great victories over disease, shouting

about magnificent stampings out of epidemics ; but meanwhile

the moujiks of desolate towns in Russia were still warding off

scourges by hitching four widows to a plow and with them

drawing a furrow round their villages in the dead of night ,

and their doctors had no sounder protection to offer them .

“ But the professors, the great doctors in Berlin , Robert,

they must know what is the cause of these sicknesses you don't

know how to stop .” So Frau Koch might have tried to con

sole him. But in 1873 — that is only fifty years ago — I must

repeat that the most eminent doctors had not one bit better

explanation for the causes of epidemics than the ignorant Rus

sian villagers who hitched the town widows to their plows. In

Paris Pasteur was preaching that microbes would soon be found

to be the murderers of consumptives: and against this crazy

L

108 KOCH

prophet rose the whole corps of the doctors of Paris, headed

by the distinguished brass-buttoned Doctor Pidoux.

“What!” roared this Pidoux, “ consumption due to a germ

one definite kind of germ ? Nonsense! A fatal thought!

Consumption is one and many at the same time. Its conclu

sion is the necrobiotic and infecting destruction of the plas

matic tissue of an organ by a number of roads that the hy .

gienist and the physician must endeavor to close ! ” It was so

that the doctors fought Pasteur's prophecies with utterly

meaningless and often idiotic words.

II

Koch was spending his evenings fussing with his new micro

scope, he was beginning to find out just the right amount of

light to shoot up into its lens with the reflecting mirror, he

was learning just how needful it was to have his thin glass

slides shining clean — those bits of glass on which he liked to

put drops of blood from the carcasses of sheep and cows, that

bad died of anthrax.

Anthrax was a strange disease which was worrying farmers

all over Europe, that here and there ruined some prosperous

owner of a thousand sheep, that in another place sneaked in

and killed the cow — the one support - of a poor widow . There

was no rime or reason to the way this plague conducted its

maraudings ; one day a fat lamb in a flock might be frisking

about, that evening this same lamb refused to eat, his head

drooped a little - and the next morning the farmer would find

him cold and stiff, his blood turned ghastly black. Then the

same thing would happen to another lamb, and a sheep , four

sheep, six sheep — there was no stopping it . And then the

farmer himself , and a shepherd, and a woolsorter, and a dealer

in hides might break out in horrible boils — or gasp out their

last breaths in a swift pneumonia.

Koch had started using his microscope with the more or

less thorough aimlessness of old Leeuwenhoek ; he examined

THE DEATH FIGHTER 109

everything under the sun, until he ran on to this blood of sheep

and cattle dead of anthrax. Then he began to concentrate, to

forget about making a call when he found a dead sheep in a

field - he haunted butcher shops to find out about the farms

where anthrax was killing the flocks. Koch hadn't the leisure

of Leeuwenhoek ; he had to snatch moments for his peerings,

between prescribing for some child that bawled with a belly

ache and the pulling out of a villager's aching tooth . In these

interrupted hours he put drops of the blackened blood of a

cow dead of anthrax between two thin pieces of glass , very

clean shining bits of glass. He looked down the tube of his mi

croscope and among the wee round drifting greenish globules of

this blood he saw strange things that looked like little sticks.

Sometimes these sticks were short, there might be only a few

of them , floating, quivering a little, among the blood globules.

But here were others, hooked together without joints --many

of them ingeniously glued together till they appeared to him

like long threads a thousand times thinner than the finest silk .

“What are these things ... are they microbes . . . are

they alive ? They do not move ... maybe the sick blood of

these poor beasts just changes into these threads and rods,”

Koch pondered. Other men of science, Davaine and Rayer in

France, had seen these same things in the blood of dead sheep ;

and they had announced that these rods were bacilli, living

germs, that they were undoubtedly the real cause of anthrax

-but they hadn't proved it , and except for Pasteur, no one

in Europe believed them . But Koch was not particularly in

terested in what anybody else thought about the threads and

rods in the blood of dead sheep and cattlethe doubts and

the laughter of doctors failed to disturb him, and the enthusi

asms of Pasteur did not for one moment make him jump at

conclusions. Luckily nobody anxious to develop young mi

crobe hunters had ever heard of Koch , he was a lone wolf

searcher - he was his own man, alone with the mysterious

tangled threads in the blood of the dead beasts.

" I do not see a way yet of finding out whether these little

110 KOCH

O . .

sticks and threads are alive,” he meditated , “ but there are

other things to learn about them . ..." Then , curiously , he

stopped studying diseased creatures and began fussing around

with perfectly healthy ones. He went down to the slaughter

houses and visited the string butchers and hobnobbed with

the meat merchants of Wollstein , and got bits of blood from

tens, dozens, fifties of healthy beasts that had been slaughtered

for meat. He stole a little more time from his tooth -pullings

and professional layings -on -of-hands. More and more Mrs.

Koch worried at his not tending to his practice. He bent over

his microscope, hours on end, watching the drops of healthy

blood.

" Those threads and rods are never found in the blood of

any healthy animal,” Koch pondered, “—this is all very well,

but it doesn't tell me whether they are bacilli , whether they are

alive ... it doesn't show me that they grow , breed, multi

ply. .

But how to find this out ? Consumptives — whom , alas, he

could not help - babies choking with diphtheria, old ladies who

imagined they were sick , all his cares of a good physician be

gan to be shoved away into one corner of his head. How -to

prove-these-wee -sticks -are -alive, this question made him for

get to sign his name to prescriptions, it made him a morose

husband, it made him call the carpenter in to put up a parti

tion in his doctor's office . And behind this wall Koch stayed

more and more hours, with his microscope and drops of black

blood of sheep mysteriously dead — and with a growing num

ber of cages full of scampering white mice.

" I haven't the money to buy sheep and cows for my ex

periments,” you can hear him muttering, while some impatient

invalid shuffled her feet in the waiting room, “ besides, cows

would be a little inconvenient to have around my office - but

maybe I can give anthrax to these mice ... maybe in them I

can prove that the sticks really grow . ..."

So this foiled globe-trotter started on his strange explora

tions. To me Koch is a still more weird and uncanny microbe,

THE DEATH FIGHTER 111

a

hunter than Leeuwenhoek, certainly he was just as much of

a self -made scientist. Koch was poor, he had his nose on the

grindstone of a medical practice, all the science he knew was

what a common medical course had taught him — and from

this, God knows, he had learned nothing whatever about the

art of doing experiments ; he had no apparatus but Emmy's

birthday present, that beloved microscope everything else he

had to invent and fashion out of bits of wood and strings and

sealing wax. Worst of all , when he came into the living room.

from his mice and microscope to tell Frau Koch about the new

strange things he had discovered, this good lady wrinkled up

her nose and told him :

“ But, Robert, you smell so ! ”

Then he hit upon a sure way to give mice the fatal disease

of anthrax . He hadn't a convenient syringe with which to shoot

the poisonous blood into them, but after sundry cursings and

the ruin of a number of perfectly good mice, he took slivers

of wood, cleaned them carefully, heated them in an oven to

kill any chance ordinary microbes that might be sticking to

them . These slivers he dipped into drops of blood from sheep

dead of anthrax, blood filled with the mysterious, motionless

threads and rods, and then - heaven knows how he managed

to hold his wiggling mouse - he made a little cut with a clean

knife at the root of the tail of the mouse, and into this cut he

delicately slid the blood-soaked splinter. He dropped this

mouse into a separate cage and washed his hands and went off

in a kind of conscientious wool-gathering way to see what was

wrong with a sick baby. ... " Will that beast, that mouse

die of anthrax . . . . Your child will be able to go back to

school next week , Frau Schmidt. ... I hope I didn't get any

of that anthrax blood into that cut on my finger. ..." Such

was Koch's life.

And next morning Koch came into his home-made labora

tory — to find the mouse on its back, stiff, its formerly sleek

fur standing on end and its whiteness of yesterday turned into

a leaden blue, its legs sticking up in the air. He heated his

112 KOCH

knives, fastened the poor dead creature onto a board, dissected

it, opened it down to its liver and lights, peered into every

corner of its carcass . " Yes, this looks like the inside of an

anthrax sheep ... see the spleen , how big, how black it

is ... it almost fills the creature's body. ..." Swiftly he

cut with a clean heated knife into this swollen spleen and put

a drop of the blackish ooze from it before his lens.

At last he muttered : " They're here, these sticks and threads

they are swarming in the body of this mouse , exactly as

they were in the drop of dead sheep's blood that I dipped

the little sliver in yesterday. " Delighted, Koch knew that

he had caused in the mouse, so cheap to buy, so easy to handle,

the sickness of sheep and cows and men. Then for a month

his life became a monotony of one dead mouse after another,

as, day after day, he took a drop of the blood or the spleen of

one dead beast, put it carefully on a clean splinter, and slid

this sliver into a cut at the root of the tail of a new healthy

mouse. Each time, next morning, Koch came into his labora

tory to find the new animal had died, of anthrax, and each time

in the blood of the dead beast his lens showed him myriads of

those sticks and tangled threads — those motionless, twenty

five-thousandth - of -an -inch thick filaments that he could never

discover in the blood of any healthy animal.

“ These threads must be alive, ” Koch pondered , "the sliver

that I put into the mouse has a drop of blood on it and that

drop holds only a few hundreds of those sticks — and these have

grown into billions in the short twenty-four hours in which

the beast became sick and died. ... But, confound it , I must

see these rods grow — and I can't look inside a live mouse !”

How - shall - I - find - a - way - to see - the - rods - grow -

out - into - threads ? This question pounded at him while he

counted pulses and looked at his patient's tongues . In the

evenings he hurried through supper and growled good -night to

Mrs. Koch and shut himself up in his little room that smelled

of mice and disinfectant, and tried to find ways to grow his

threads outside a mouse's body. At this time Koch knew.

THE DEATH FIGHTER 113

little or nothing about the yeast soups and flasks of Pasteur,

and the experiments he fussed with had the crude originality

of the first cave man trying to make fire.

" I will try to make these threads multiply in something that

is as near as possible like the stuff an animal's body is made

of — it must be just like living stuff, ” Koch muttered, and he

put a wee pin -point piece of spleen from a dead mousespleen

that was packed with the tangled threads, into a little drop of

the watery liquid from the eye of an ox. “ That ought to be

good food for them ,” he grumbled. “ But maybe, too, the

threads have got to have the temperature of a mouse's body

to grow ,” he said , and he built with his own hands a clumsy

incubator, heated by an oil lamp. In this uncertain machine

he deposited the two flat pieces of glass between which he had

put the drop of liquid from the ox -eye. Then, in the middle

of the night, after he had gone to bed , but not to sleep, he

got up to turn the wick of his smoky incubator lamp down

a little, and instead of going back to rest, again and again he

slid the thin strips of glass with their imprisoned infinitely

little sticks before his microscope. Sometimes he thought he

could see them growing — but he could not be sure, because

other microbes, swimming and cavorting ones, had an abomi

nable way of getting in between these strips of glass, over-grow

ing, choking out the slender dangerous rods of anthrax.

" I must grow my rods pure, absolutely pure, without any

other microbes around, ” he muttered . And he kept flounder

ingly trying ways to do this , and his perplexity pushed up

huge wrinkles over the bridge of his nose, and built crow's - feet

round his eyes.

Then one day a perfectly easy , a foolishly simple way to

watch his rods grow flashed into Koch's head. " I'll put them

in a hanging-drop, where no other bugs can get in among

them ,” he muttered . On a flat, clear piece of glass, very thin,

which he had heated thoroughly to destroy all chance microbes,

Koch placed å drop of the watery fluid of an eye from a just

butchered healthy ox ; into this drop he delicately inserted the

114 KOCH

wee -est fragment of spleen, fresh out of a mouse that had a

moment before died miserably of anthrax. Over the drop he

put a thick oblong piece of glass with a concave well scooped

out of it so that the drop would not be touched. Around this

well he had smeared some vaseline to make the thin glass stick

to the thick one. Then, dextrously, he turned this simple ap

paratus upside down , and presto !-here was his hanging

drop, his ox-eye fluid with its rod-swarming spleen, imprisoned

in the well - away from all other microbes.

Koch did not know it , perhaps, but this — apart from that

day when Leeuwenhoek first saw little animals in rain water

—was a most important moment in microbe hunting, and in

the fight of mankind against death.

“ Nothing can get into that drop - only the rods are there

now we'll see if they will grow , " whispered Koch as he slid his

hanging - drop under the lens of his microscope ; in a kind of

stolid excitement he pulled up his chair and sat down to watch

what would happen. In the gray circle of the field of his lens

he could see only a few shreddy lumps of mouse spleen—they

looked microscopically enormous — and here and there a very

tiny rod floated among these shreds. He looked - fifty min

utes out of each hour for two hours he looked , and nothing

happened. But then a weird business began among the shreds

of diseased spleen , an unearthly moving picture, a drama that

made shivers shoot up and down his back.

The little drifting rods had begun to grow ! Here were two

where one had been before. There was one slowly stretching

itself out into a tangled endless thread , pushing its snaky way

across the whole diameter of the field of the lens—in a couple

of hours the dead small chunks of spleen were completely hid

den by the myriads of rods, the masses of thread that were

THE DEATH FIGHTER 115

like a hopelessly tangled ball of colorless yarn , living yarn

silent murderous yarn .

" Now I know that these rods are alive, ” breathed Koch .

" Now I see the way they grow into millions in my poor little

mice — in the sheep, in the cows even . One of these rods, these

bacilli - he is a billion times smaller than an ox- just one of

them maybe gets into an ox, and he doesn't bear any grudge

against the ox, he doesn't hate him, but he grows, this bacillus,

into millions, everywhere through the big animal, swarming

in his lungs and brain, choking his blood -vessels — it is terri

ble . ”

Time, his office and its dull duties, his waiting and com

plaining patients — all of these things became nonsense, seemed

of no account, were unreal to Koch whose head was now full

of nothing but dreadful pictures of the tangled skeins of the

anthrax threads. Then each day of a nervous experiment that

lasted eight days Koch repeated his miracle of making a mil

lion bacilli grow where only a few were before. He planted

a wee bit of his rod -swarming hanging-drop into a fresh, pure

drop of the watery fluid of an ox-eye and in every one of these

new drops the few rods grew into myriads.

"I have grown these bacilli for eight generations away from

any animal , I have grown them pure, apart from any other

microbe there is no part of the dead mouse's spleen , no dis

eased tissue left in this eighth hanging-drop - only the chil

dren of the bacilli that killed the mouse are in it . . . . Will

these bacilli still grow in a mouse, or in a sheep , if I inject

them - are these threads really the cause of anthrax? ”

Carefully Koch smeared a wee bit of his hanging-drop that

swarmed with the microbes of the eighth generation -- this drop

was murky, even to his naked eye, with countless bacilli — he

smeared a part of this drop on to a little splinter of wood.

Then , with that guardian angel who cares for daring stumbling

imprudent searchers of nature standing by him, Koch deftly

slid this splinter under the skin of a healthy mouse.

.

116 KOCH

The next day Koch was bending near-sightedly over the

body of this little creature pinned on his dissecting board ;

giddy with hope, he was carefully flaming his knives. . .

Not three minutes later Koch is seated before his microscope,

a bit of the dead creature's spleen between two thin bits of

glass. "I've proved it,” he whispers, "here are the threads,

the rods — those little bacilli from my hanging drop were just

as murderous as the ones right out of the spleen of a dead

sheep. "

So it was that Koch found in this last mouse exactly the

same kind of microbe that he had spied long before having

no idea it was alive in the blood of the first dead cow he had

peered at when his hands were fumbling and his microscope

was new. It was precisely the same kind of bacillus that he

had nursed so carefully, through long successions of mice,

through I do not know how many hanging -drops.

First of all searchers, of all men that ever lived, ahead of

the prophet Pasteur who blazed the trail for him , Koch had

really made sure that one certain kind of microbe causes one

definite kind of disease, that miserably small bacilli may be

the assassins of formidable animals. He had angled for these

impossibly tiny fish, and spied on them without knowing any

thing at all of their habits, their lurking places, of how hardy

they might be or how vicious, of how easy it might be for them

to leap upon him from the perfect ambush their invisibility

V

gave them .

III

Cool and stolid, Koch , now that be had come through these

perils, never thought himself a hero ; he did not even think of

publishing his experiments! To-day it would be inconceivable

for a man to do such magnificent work and discover such mo

mentous secrets, and keep his mouth shut about it.

But Koch plugged on, and it is doubtful whether this hesi

tating, entirely modest genius of a German country doctor

THE DEATH FIGHTER 117

realized the beauty or the importance of his lonely experi

ments .

He plugged on . He must know more ! He went pell -mell

at the inoculating of guinea -pigs and rabbits, and at last even

sheep, with the innocent looking but fatal fluid from the hang

ing -drops; and in each one of these beasts, in the sheep just

as quickly and horribly as the mouse, the few thousands of

microbes on the splinter multiplied into billions in the animals,

in a few hours they teemed poisonously in what had been

robust tissues, choking the little veins and arteries with their

myriads, turning to a sinister black the red blood - so killing

the sheep , the guinea -pigs, and the rabbits.

At one fantastic jump Koch had soared out of the vast

anonymous rank and file of pill -rollers and landed among the

most original of the searchers, and the more ingeniously he

bunted microbes, the more miserably he tended to the impor

tant duties of his practice. Babies in far -off farms howled, but

he did not cone; peasants, with jumping aches in their teeth,

waited sullen hours for him and at last he had to turn over

part of his practice to another doctor. Mrs. Koch saw little

of him and worried and wished he would not go on his calls

smelling of germicides and of his menagerie of animals. But

so far as he was concerned his suffering patients and his wife

might have been inhabitants of the other side of the moon—

for a new mysterious question was worrying at his head, tug

ging at him , keeping him awake:

How , in nature, do these little weak anthrax bacilli that fade

away and die so easily on my slides, how do they get from sick

animals to healthy ones ?

There were superstitions among the farmers and horse doc

tors of Europe about this disease, strange beliefs in regard to

the mysterious power of this plague that hung always over

their flocks and herds like some cruel invisible sword. Why,

this disease is too terrible to be caused by such a wretched little

creature as a twenty - thousandth -of-an -inch - long bacillus !

"Your little germ may be what kills our herds, all right,

118 KOCH

Herr Doktor, " the cattle men told Koch, " but how is it that

our cows or sheep can be all right in one pasture - perfectly

healthy, and then, when we take them into another field, with

fine grazing in it, they die like flies ? ”

Koch knew of this troublesome, mysterious fact too . He

knew that in Auvergne in France there were green mountains,

horrible mountains where no flock of sheep could go without

being picked off, one by one, or in dozens and even hundreds

by the black disease, anthrax. And in the country of the

Beauce there were fertile fields where sheep grew fat - only to

die of anthrax. The peasants shivered at night by their fires :

“ Our fields are cursed, ” they whispered.

These things bothered Koch - how could his tiny bacilli live

over winter, even for years, in the fields and on the mountains ?

How could they, indeed, when he had smeared a little bacillus

swarming spleen from a dead mouse on a clean slip of glass,

and watched the microbes grow dim, break up, and fade from

view ? And when he put the nourishing watery fluid of ox

eyes on these bits of glass, the bacilli would no longer grow ;

when he washed the dried blood off and injected it into mice

—these little beasts continued to scamper gayly about in their

cages. The microbes, which two days before could have killed

a heavy cow, were dead !

"What keeps them alive in the fields, then ," muttered Koch,

" when they die on my clean glasses in two days? ”

Then one day he ran on to a curious sight under his micro

scope — a strange transformation of his microbes that gave him

a clew to his question ; and Koch sat down on his stool in his

eight-by -ten laboratory in East Prussia and solved the mys

tery of the cursed fields and mountains of France. He had

kept a hanging -drop, in its closed glass well, at the temper

ature of a mouse's body for twenty-four hours. " Ah, this ought

to be full of nice long threads of bacilli,” he muttered , and

looked down the tube of his microscope— “ What's this ?” he

cried.

The outlines of the threads had grown dim, and each thread

THE DEATH FIGHTER 119

was speckled, through its whole length , with little ovals that

shone brightly like infinitely tiny glass beads, and these beads

were arranged along the threads as perfectly as a string of

pearls.

To himself Koch muttered guttural curses. “Other microbes

have doubtless gotten into my hanging-drop ," he grumbled, but

when he looked very carefully he saw that wasn't true , for the

shiny little beads were inside the threads — the bacilli that make

up the threads have turned into these beads ! He dried this

hanging -drop, and put it away carefully, for a month or so,

and then as luck would have it , looked at it once more through

his lens. The strange strings of beads were still there, shining

as brightly as ever. Then an idea for an experiment got hold

of him - he took a drop of pure fresh watery fluid from the

eye of an ox. He placed it on the dried-up smear with its

months -old bacilli that had turned into beads. His head swam

with confused surprise as he looked, and watched the beads

grow back into the ordinary bacilli , and then into long threads

once more. It was outlandish !

“ Those queer shiny beads have turned back into ordinary

anthrax bacilli again ,” cried Koch, “ the beads must be the

spores of the microbe - the tough form of them that can stand

great heat, and cold, and drying. . . . That must be the way

the anthrax microbe can keep itself alive in the fields for so

long — the bacillimust turn into spores. ..."

Then Koch launched himself into thorough, ingenious tests

to see if his quick guess was right. Expertly now he took

spleens out of mice which had perished of anthrax - he lifted

this deadly stuff out carefully with heated knives and forceps.

Protected from all chance of contamination by stray microbes

of the air, he kept the spleens for a day at the temperature of

a mouse's body, and, sure enough, the microbes, every thread

of them , turned into glassy spores.

Then in experiments that kept him incessantly in his dirty

little room he found that the spores remained alive for months,

ready to hatch out into deadly bacilli the moment he put them

1 20 KOCH

into a fresh drop of the watery fluid of ox -eyes , or the instant

he stuck them , on one of his thin slivers, into the root of a

mouse's tail.

" These spores never form in an animal while he is still alive

—they only appear after he has died, and then only when he is

kept very warm , ” said Koch, and he proved this beautifully by

clapping spleens into an ice chest — and in a few days this

stuff, smeared on splinters, was no more dangerous than if he

had shot so much beefsteak into his mice .

It was now the year 1876, and Koch was thirty -four years

old , and at last he emerged out of the bush of Wollstein, to

tell the world - stuttering a littlethat it was at last proved

that microbes were the cause of disease. Koch put on his best

suit and his gold -rimmed spectacles and packed up his micro

scope, a few hanging-drops in their glass cells, swarming with

murderous anthrax bacilli; and besides these things he bundled

a cage into the train with him, a cage that bounced a little with

several dozen healthy white mice. He took a train for Breslau

to exhibit his anthrax microbes and the way they kill mice, and

the weird way in which they turn into glassy spores — he

wanted to demonstrate these things to old Professor Cohn , the

botanist at the University , who had sometimes written him en

couraging letters.

Professor Cohn, who had been amazed at the marvelous ex

periments about which the lonely Koch had written him , old

Cohn snickered when he thought of how this greenhorn doctor

--who had no idea , himself, of how original he was would

surprise the highbrows of the University. He sent out invita

tions to the most eminent medicoes of the school to come to

the first night of Koch's show.

a

L

IV

And they came. To hear the unscientific backwoodsman

they came. They came maybe out of friendliness to old Pro

fessor Cohn. But Koch didn't lecture — he was never much at

THE DEATH FIGHTER 121

talking — instead of telling them that his microbes were the

true cause of anthrax, he showed these sophisticated professors.

For three days and nights he showed them , taking them in

swift steps through those searchings he had sweated at - grop

ing and failing often — for years. Never was there a greater

come- down for bigwigs who had arrived prepared to be indul

gent to a nobody. Koch never argued once, he never bubbled

and raved and made prophecies — but he slipped slivers into

mouse tails with an unearthly cleverness, and the experienced

professors of pathology opened their eyes to see him handle

his spores and bacilli and microscopes like a sixty -year-old

master. It was a knock -out!

At last Professor Cohnheim , one of the most skillful scien

tists in the study of diseases in all of Europe, could hold him

self no longer. He rushed from the hall, hurried to his

own laboratory, and burst into the room where his young

student searchers were working. He shouted to them : “My

boys, drop everything and go see Doctor Koch — this man

has made a great discovery !” Cohnheim gasped to get his

breath ,

“ But who is this Koch, Herr Professor ? We've never even

heard of him .”

" No matter who he is — it is a great discovery, so exact, so

simple. It is astounding! This Koch is not a professor,

even . He hasn't even been taught how to do research !

He's done it all by himself, complete there is nothing more

to do ! ”

“ But what is this discovery, Herr Professor ? "

“Go, I tell you, every one of you, and see for yourselves . It

is the most marvelous discovery in the realm of microbes .

he will make us all ashamed of ourselves. ... Go " But

by this time, all of them, including Paul Ehrlich, had dis

appeared through the door.

Seven years before, Pasteur had foretold : " It is within the

power of man to make parasitic maladies disappear from the

face of the earth...." And when he said these words the."

122 KOCH

wisest doctors in the world put their fingers to their heads,

thinking : " The poor fellow is cracked ! "

But this night Robert Koch had shown the world the first

step toward the fulfillment of Pasteur's seemingly insane vision :

“ Tissues from animals dead of anthrax, whether they are fresh ,

or putrid , or dried , or a year old, can only produce anthrax

when they contain bacilli or the spores of bacilli. Before this

fact all doubt must be laid aside that these bacilli are the cause

of anthrax,” he told them finally, as if his experiments had not

convinced them already. And he ended by telling his amazed

audience how to fight this terrible disease — how his experi

ments showed a way to stamp it out in the end : " All animals

that die of anthrax must be destroyed at once after they die

—or if they can not be burned, they should be buried deep

in the ground, where the earth is so cold that the bacilli can

not turn into the tough, long-lived spores. . .

So it was that in these three days at Breslau this Koch put

a sword Excalibur into the hands of men, with which to begin

the fight against their enemies the microbes, their fight against

lurking death ; so it was that he began to change the whole

business of doctors from a foolish hocus-pocus with pills and

leeches into an intelligent fight where science instead of super

stition was the weapon .

Koch fell among friends-- among honest generous men — at

Breslau. Cohn and Cohnheim, instead of trying to steal his

stuff ( there are no fewer shady fellows in science than in any

other human activity ) , these two professors immediately set

up a great whooping for Koch, an applause that echoed over

Europe and made Pasteur a bit uneasy for his job as Dean of

the Microbe Hunters. These two friends began to bombard

the authorities of the Imperial Health Office at Berlin about

this unknown that Germany ought to be proud of — they did

their best to give Koch a chance to do nothing but chase the

microbes of disease, to get away from that dull practice of his .

Left alone , or snubbed at Breslau, he might easily have gone

back to Wollstein to his business of telling people to stick out

THE DEATH FIGHTER 123

their tongues. In short, men of science have either to be

showmen — as were the magnificent Spallanzani and the pas

sionate Pasteur - or they have to have impresarios.

Koch packed up Emmy and his household goods and moved

to Breslau and was given a job as city physician at four hun

dred and fifty dollars a year, and was supposed to eke out his

living with the private patients that would undoubtedly flock

to be treated by such a brilliant man.

So thought Cohn and Cohnheim . But the doorbell of Koch's

little office didn't ring, hardly any one came to ring it , and so

Koch learned that it is a great disadvantage for a doctor to

be brainy and inquire into the final causes of things . He went

back to Wollstein , beaten , and here from 1878 to 1880 he

made long jumps ahead in microbe hunting once more - spying

on and tracking down the strange sub -visible beings that cause

the deadly infections of wounds in animals and in human be

ings. He learned to stain all kinds of bacilli with different

colored dyes, so that the very tiniest microbe would stand out

clearly. In some unknown way he saved money enough to

buy a camera and stuck its lens against his microscope and

learned - no one helping him - how to take pictures of these

little creatures.

“You'll never convince the world about these murderous

bugs until you can show them photographs, ” Koch said . "Two

men can't look through one microscope at the same time, no

two men will ever draw the same picture of a germ—so there'll

always be wrangling and confusion. . . . But these photo

graphs can't lie — and ten men can study them , and come to an

Agreement on them. ...” So it was that Koch began to try

to introduce rime and reason into the baby science of microbe

hunting which up till now had been as much a wordy brawl as

a quest for knowledge.

Meanwhile his friends at Breslau had not forgotten him and

in 1880 — it was like some bush-leaguer breaking into the big

team - he was told by the government to come to Berlin and

be Extraordinary Associate of the Imperial Health Office.

L

. e

.

124 KOCH

Here he was given a fine laboratory and a sudden un

dreamed -of wealth of apparatus and two assistants and enough

money so that he could spend sixteen or eighteen hours of his

working day among his stains and tubes and chittering guinea

pigs.

By this time the news of Koch's discoveries had spread to

all of the laboratories of Europe and had crossed the ocean

and inflamed the doctors of America. The vast exciting Bat

tle of the Germ Theory was on ! Every medical man and

Professor of Diseases who knew - or thought he knew — the

top end from the bottom of a microscope set out to become

a microbe hunter . Every week brought glad news of the sup

posed discovery of some new deadly microbe, surely the as

sassin of suffering from cancer or typhoid fever or consump

tion . One enthusiast would shout across continents that he

had discovered a kind of pan - germ that caused all diseases

from pneumonia to the pip - only to be forgotten for an idiot

who might claim that he had proved one disease , let us say

consumption, to be the result of the attack of a hundred dif

ferent species of microbes.

So great was the enthusiasm about germs— and the con

fusion — that Koch's discoveries were in danger of being—

laughed into obscurity along with the vast magazines full of

balderdash that were being printed on the subject of the germ

theory .

And yet to -day we demand with a great hue and cry more

laboratories, more microbe hunters, better paid searchers to

free us from the diseases that scourge us. How futile ! For

progress, God must send us a few more infernal marvelous

searchers of the kind of Robert Koch.

But in the midst of the danger that foolish enthusiasm

would kill the new science of microbe hunting, Koch kept his

head , and sat down to find a way to grow germs pure. “ One

germ, one kind of germ only, causes one definite kind of dis

ease — every disease has its own specific microbe , I know that, ”

said Koch-without knowing it . " I've got to find a sure easy

THE DEATH FIGHTER 125

method of growing one species of germ away from all other

contaminating ones that are always threatening to sneak in !"

But how to cage one kind of microbe ? All manner of weird

machines were being invented to try to keep different sorts of

germs apart . Several microbe hunters devised apparatus sa

complicated that when they had finished building it they prob

ably had already forgotten what they set out to invent it for.

To keep stray germs of the air from falling into their bottles

some heroic searchers did their inoculations in an actual rain

of poisonous germicides !

V

Until, one day, Koch - who frankly admitted it was by acci

dent — looked at the flat surface of half of a boiled potato left

on a table in his laboratory. “ What's this, I wonder ? ” he

muttered, as he stared at a curious collection of little colored

droplets scattered on the surface of the potato. " Here's a

gray colored drop, here's a red one, there's a yellow , a violet

one — these little specks must be made up of germs from the

air . I'll have a look at them ."

He stuck his short- sighted eyes down close to the potato so

that his scraggly little beard almost dragged in it ; he got ready

his thin plates of glass and polished off the lenses of his micro

scope.

With a slender wire of platinum he fished delicately into one

of the gray droplets and put a bit of its slimy stuff in a little

pure water between two bits of glass, under his microscope.

Here he saw a swarm of bacilli, swimming gently about, and

every one of these microbes looked exactly like his thousands

of brothers in this drop. Then Koch peered at the bugs from

a yellow droplet on the potato , and at those of a red one and

a violet one. The germs from one were round, from another

they had the appearance of swimming sticks, from a third

microbes looked like living corkscrews — but all the microbes

in one given drop were like their brothers, invariably !

126 KOCH

. .

Then in a flash Koch saw the beautiful experiment nature

had done for him . “Every one of these droplets is a pure

culture of one definite kind of microbe - a pure colony of one

species of germs. How simple ! When germs fall from

the air into the liquid soups we have been using — the different

kinds of them get all mixed up and swim among each

other. . . . But when different bugs fall from the air on the

solid surface of this potato - each one has to stay where it

falls ... it sticks thereit sticks there ... then it grows there, multiplies

into millions of its own kind . . . absolutely pure !”

Koch called Loeffler and Gaffky, his two military doctor as

sistants, and soberly he showed them the change in the whole

mixed -up business of microbe hunting that his chance glance at

an abandoned potato had brought. It was revolutionary! The

three of them set to work with an amazing - loyal Frenchmen

might call it stupid - German thoroughness to see if Koch was

right. There they sat before the three windows of their room ,

Koch before his microscope on a high stool in the middle,

Loeffler and Gaffky on stools on his left hand and his right

a kind of grimly toiling trinity. They tried to defeat their

hopes, but quickly they discovered that Koch's prophecy was

an even more true one than he had dreamed. They made mix

tures of two or three kinds of germs, mixtures that could never

have been untangled by growing in flasks of soup ; they

streaked these confused species of microbes on the cut flat

surfaces of boiled potatoes. And where each separate tiny

microbe landed, there it stuck, and grew into a colony of mil

lions of its own kind - and nothing but its own kind.

Now Koch, who, by this simple experience of the old potato ,

had changed microbe hunting from a guessing game into some

thing that came near the sureness of a science -- Koch, I say ,

got ready to track down the tiny messengers that bring a dozen

murderous diseases to mankind. Up till this time Koch had

had very little criticism or opposition from other men of

science, mainly because he almost never opened his mouth un

til he was sure of his results. He told of his discoveries with

THE DEATH FIGHTER 127

a disarming modesty and his work was so unanswerably com

plete - he had a way of seeing the objections that critics might

make and replying to them in advance that it was hard to

find protestors.

Full of confidence Koch went to Professor Rudolph Vir

chow , by far the most eminent German researcher in disease,

an incredible savant, who knew more than there was to be

known about a greater number of subjects than any sixteen

scientists together could possibly know . Virchow was , in brief,

the ultimate Pooh-Bah of German medical science. He had

spoken the very last word on clots in blood vessels and had

invented the impressive words, heteropopia, agenesia, and

ochronosis, and many others that I have been trying for years

to understand the meaning of. He had — with tremendous mis

takenness — maintained that consumption and scrofula were

two different diseases; but with his microscope he had made

genuinely good, even superb descriptions of theway sick tissues

look and he had turned his lens into every noisome nook and

cranny of twenty - six thousand dead bodies. Virchow had

printed — I do not exaggerate — thousands of scientific papers,

on every subject imaginable, from the shapes of little German

schoolboys' heads and noses to the remarkably small size of

the blood vessels in the bodies of sickly green -faced girls.

Properly awed — as any one would be Koch tiptoed re

spectfully into this Presence.

" I have discovered a way to grow microbes pure, unmixed

with other germs, Herr Professor, ” the bashful Koch told Vir

chow , with deference.

"And how, I beg you tell me, can you do that ? It looks to

me to be impossible.”

“ By growing them on solid food- I can get beautiful isolated

colonies of one kind of microbe on the surface of a boiled po

tato . ... And now I have invented a better way than

that ... I mix gelatin with beef broth ... and the gelatin

sets and makes a solid surface, and "

But Virchow was not impressed. He made a sardonic re

128 KOCH

mark that it was so hard to keep different races of germs from

getting mixed up that Koch would have to have a separate

laboratory for each species of microbe. ... In short, Virchow

was very sniffish and cold to Koch, for he had come to that

time of life when ageing men believe that everything is known

and there is nothing more to be found out. Koch went away

a bit depressed, but not one jot was he discouraged. Instead

of arguing and writing papers and making speeches against

Virchow he launched himself into the most exciting and superb

of all his microbe huntings — he set out to spy upon and dis

cover the most vicious of microbes, that mysterious marauder

which each year killed one man, woman, and child out of every

seven that died, in Europe, in America. Koch rolled up his

sleeves and wiped his gold -rimmed glasses and set out to hunt

down the microbe of tuberculosis.

VI

Compared to this sly murderer the bacillus of anthrax had

been reasonably easy to discover - it was a large bug as mi

crobes go, and the bodies of sick animals were literally alive

with anthrax germs when the beasts were about to die. But

this tubercle germ - if indeed there was such a creature — was

a different matter. Many searchers were looking in vain for

it. Leeuwenhoek, with his sharpest of all eyes, would never

have found it even if he had looked at a hundred sick lungs;

Spallanzani's microscopes would not have been good enough to

have revealed this sly microbe; Pasteur, searcher that he was,

had neither the precise methods of searching, nor, perhaps, the

patience, to lay bare this assassin .

All that was known about tuberculosis was that it must be

caused by some kind of microbe, since it could be transmitted

from sick men to healthy animals. An old Frenchman, Ville

min, had pioneered in this work, and Cohnheim , the brilliant

professor of Breslau, had found that he could give tuberculosis

to rabbits — by putting a bit of the consumptive's sick lung

THE DEATH FIGHTER 129

.

into the front chamber of a rabbit's eye. Here Cohnheim

could watch the little islands of sick tissue the tubercles

spread and do their deadly work ; it was a strange clever ex

periment that was like looking through a window at a disease

growing.

Koch had studied Cohnheim's experiments closely. “ This

is what I need,” he meditated. “ I may not use human beings

for experimental animals, but now I can give the disease,

whenever I wish , to animals . . . here is a real chance to

study it, handle it, to look for the microbe that must cause

it ... there must be a microbe there. ..."a

So Koch set to work - he did everything with a cold system

that gives one the shivers when one reads his scientific reports

-and he got his first consumptive stuff from a powerful man ,a

a laborer aged thirty -six. This man had been superbly healthy

three weeks before, when all at once he began to cough, little

pains shot through his chest, his body seemed literally to melt

away . Four days after this poor fellow entered the hospital,

he was dead, riddled with tubercles — every organ was peppered

with little grayish -yellow , millet-seed - like specks

With this dangerous stuff Koch set to work, alone, for

Loeffler had set out to track down the microbe of diphtheria

and Gaffky was busy trying to find the sub -visible author of

typhoid fever. Koch, meanwhile, crushed the yellowish tuber

cles from the body of the dead man between two heated

knives; he ground these granules up and delicately, with a

little syringe, injected them into the eyes of numerous rabbits

and under the skins of flocks of foolish guinea -pigs. He put

these beasts in clean cages and tended them lovingly. And

while he waited for his creatures to develop signs of the con

sumption, he began to peer with his most powerful micro

scope through the sick tissues that he had taken from the body

of the dead workman .

For days he saw nothing. His best lenses, that magnified

many hundred times, showed him only the dead ruins of what

had once been good healthy lung or liver . “ If there is a tuber

130 KOCH

!

cle microbe, he is such a sneaky fellow that I won't be able,

perhaps, to see him in his native state. But I can try painting

the tissue with a powerful dye — that may make this bug stand

out .

Day after day, Koch set about staining the stuff from the

dead workman brown and blue and violet and most of the

colors of the rainbow . Carefully, dipping his hands in the

germ -killing bichloride of mercury after almost every move

blackening and wrinkling them with it — he smeared the peril

ous material from the tubercles on thin clean bits of glass and

kept these pieces of glass for hours in a strong blue dye.

Then one morning he took his specimens out of their bath

of stain, and put them under his lens, and focussed his micro

scope and out of the gray mist a strange picture untangled it

self. Lying among the shattered diseased lung cells were curi

ous masses of little, infinitely thin bacilli — blue colored rods

-so slim that he could not guess their size, and they were less

than a fifteen -thousandth of an inch long.

“ Ah ! they are pretty,” he muttered . “They're not straight

like the anthrax bugs ... they have little bends and curves

in them. Wait! here are whole bunches of them ... like

cigarettes in a pack - Heh ! here is one lone devil inside a lung

cell ... I wonder ...bave I found him — that tubercleI

bug, already ? "

Koch went on, preciseiy , with that efficiency of his, to staine

ing tubercles from every part of the workman's body, and

everywhere his blue dye showed up these same slender crooked

bacilli - strange creatures unlike any he had seen in all the

thousands of animals or men, diseased or healthy , into whose

insides he had pried. And now, sorry things began to happen

to his inoculated guinea-pigs and rabbits. The guinea -pigs

began to huddle disconsolately in the corners of their cages ;

their sleek coats ruffled and their bouncing little bodies began

to fall away until they were sad bags of bones. They were

feverish , their cavortings stopped and they looked listlessly at

their fine carrots and their fragrant meals of hay — and one by

.

1

THE DEATH FIGHTER 131

one they died. And as these unconscious martyrs died for

Koch's mad curiosity and for suffering men — the little microbe

hunter pinned them down on his post -mortem board and

soaked their sick hair with bichloride of mercury and precisely

and with breathless care cut them open with sterile knives.

And inside these poor beasts Koch found the same kind of

grayish -yellow sinister tubercles that had filled the body of the

workman . Into the baths of blue stain on his eternal strips

of glass Koch dipped them — and everywhere, in every one, he

found the same terrible curved sticks that had jumped into his

astounded gaze when he had stained the lung of the dead man.

“ I have it !” he whispered, and called the busy Loeffler and

the faithful Gaffky from their own spyings on other microbes.

“ Look ! ” Koch cried . “One little speck of tubercle I put into

this beast six weeks ago there could not have been more

than a few hundred of those bacilli in that small bit - and

now they've grown into billions! What devils they are, those

germs— from that one place in the guinea -pig's groin they have

sneaked everywhere into his body, they have gnawed — they

have grown through the walls of his arteries ... the blood

has carried them into his bones ... into the farthest cor

ner of his brain . ..."

Now he went to hospitals everywhere in Berlin, and begged

the bodies of men or women that had died of consumption, he

spent dreary days in dead houses and every evening before his

microscope in his laboratory where the stillness was broken

only by the eerie purrings and scurryings of guinea -pigs. He

injected the sick tissue from the wasted bodies of consumptives

who had died, into hundreds of guinea -pigs, into rabbits and

three dogs, thirteen scratching cats , ten flopping chickens and

twelve pigeons. He didn't stop with these wholesale insane

inoculations but shot the same kind of deadly cheesy stuff

into white mice and rats and field mice and into two marmots.

Never in microbe hunting has there been such appalling thor

oughness.

" Ach ! this is a little hard on the nerves , this work ," he

132 KOCH

muttered ( thinking, perhaps of the lightning move of the paw

of one of his cats jabbing the germ - filled syringe needle into

his own hand ). For Koch, hunting his invisible foes alone,

there were so many disagreeable and always imminent possi

bilities of excitement - of something tragically worse than mere

excitement..

But the hand of this completely unheroic looking little mi

crobe hunter never slipped, it just grew drier and more

wrinkled and blacker from its incessant baths in the bichloride

of mercury — that good bichloride, with which in those old

days the groping microbe hunters used to swab down every

thing, including their own persons. Then, week by week , in all

of Koch's meaouwing, crowing, barking, clucking menagerie of

beasts those small curved bacilli grew into their relentless mil

lions — and one by one the animals died, and gave eighteen

hour -days of work to Robert Koch in post-mortems and blear

eyed peerings through the microscope.

“It is only when a man or beast has tuberculosis that I can

find these blue-stained rods, these bacilli ,” Koch told Loeffler

and Gaffky. " In healthy animals — I have looked, you know ,

at hundreds of them I never find them ."

" That means, without doubt, that you have discovered the

bacillus that is the cause, Herr Doktor— "

“ No — not yet — what I have done might make Pasteur sure,

but I am not at all convinced yet . ... I have to get these

bacilli out of the bodies of my dying animals now . . . grow

them on our beef broth jelly, pure colonies of these microbes

I must get, and cultivate them for months, away from any

living creature ... and then , if I inoculate these cultivations

into good healthy animals, and they get tuberculosis

and Koch's sober wrinkled face smiled for a moment. Loef

fler and Gaffky, ashamed of their jumping at conclusions, went

back awed to their own searchings.

Testing every possible combination that his head could in

vent, Koch set out to try to grow his bacilli pure on beef -broth

jelly. He made a dozen different kinds of good soup for them ,

THE DEATH FIGHTER 133

he kept his tubes and bottles at the temperature of the room

and the temperature of a man's body and the temperature of

fever. He cleverly used the sick lungs of guinea -pigs that

teemed with bacilli, lungs that held no other stray microbes

which might over-grow and choke out those delicate germs

which he was sure must be the authors of consumption. The

stuff from these lungs he planted dangerously into hundreds

of tubes and bottles, but all this work ended in - nothing. In

brief, those slim bacilli that grew like weeds in tropic gardens

in the bodies of his sick animals, those microbes that swarmed

in millions in sick men, those bacilli turned up their noses

that is , they would have if they had been equipped with noses

-at the good soups and jellies that Koch cooked for them .

It was no go!

But one day a reason for his failures popped into Koch's

head : “ The trouble is that these tubercle bacilli will only grow

in the bodies of living creatures — they are maybe almost com

plete parasites — I must fix a food for them that is as near as

possible like the stuff a living animal's body is made of ! ”

So it was that Koch invented his famous food - blood -serum

jelly - for microbes that are too finicky to grow on common

provender. He went to string- butchers and got the clear

straw-colored serum from the clotted blood of freshly slaugh

tered healthy cattle and carefully heated this fluid to kill all

the stray microbes that might have fallen into it. Delicately

he poured this serum into each one of dozens of narrow test

tubes , and placed these on a slant so that there would be a

long flat surface on which to smear the sick consumptive

tissues. Then ingeniously he heated each tube just hot enough

to make the serum set, on a slant, into a clear beautiful jelly.

That morning a guinea -pig, sadly riddled with tuberculosis,

had died. He dissected out of it a couple of the grayish yel.

low tubercles, and then, with a wire of platinum he streaked

bits of this bacillus -swarming stuff on the moist surface of his

serum jelly, on tube after tube of it . Then, with that drawing in

and puffing out of breath that comes after a nasty piece of

134 KOCH

work , well done, Koch took his tubes and put them in the overa

-at the exact temperature of a guinea -pig's body .

Day after day Koch hurried in the morning to his incubat

ing oven, and took out his tubes and held them close to his

gold -rimmed glasses, and saw - nothing.

“ Well, I have failed again, ” he mumbled - it was the four

teenth day after he had planted his consumptive stuff— " every

other microbe I have ever grown multiplies into large colonies

in a couple of days, but here, confound it — there is nothing,

nothing ..."

Any other man would have pitched these barren disappoint

ing serum - tubes out, but at this stubbly - haired country doc

tor's shoulder his familiar demon whispered : “ Wait - be pa

tient, my master - you know that tubercle germs sometimes

take months, years to kill men. Maybe too they grow very

slowly in the serum tubes. ” So Koch did not pitch the tubes

out, and on the morning of the fifteenth day he came back to

his incubator — to find the velvety surface of the serum jelly

covered with tiny glistening specks! Koch reached a trem

bling hand for his pocket lens, clapped it to his eye and peered

at one tube after another, and through his lens these glistening

specks swelled out into dry tiny scales.

In a daze Koch pulled the cotton plug out of one of his

tubes, mechanically he flamed its mouth in the sputtering blue

fire of the Bunsen burner, with a platinum wire he picked off

one of these little flaky colonies — they must be microbes

and not knowing how or what, he got them before his micro

scope.

Then he knew that he had got to a warm inn on the stony

road of his adventure — here they were, countless myriads of

these same bacilli , these crooked rods that he had first spied

in the lung of the dead workman. They were motionless but

surely multiplying and alive — they were delicate and finicky

about their food and feeble in size, but more savage than

hordes of Huns and more murderous than ten thousand nests

of rattlesnakes

. .

THE DEATH FIGHTER 135

Now Koch , in taut intent months, confirmed his first suc

cess — he went after proving it with a patience and a detail

that made me sick of his everlasting thoroughness and pru

dence as I read the endlessly multiplied experiments in his

classic report on tuberculosis — from consumptive monkeys

and consumptive oxen and consumptive guinea -pigs Koch grew

forty -three different families of these deadly rods on his slanted

tubes of serum jelly !

And only from animals sick or dying of tuberculosis, could

he grow them . For months he nursed these wee murderers

along, planting them from one tube to another — with marvel

ous watchfulness he kept all other chance microbes away from

them .

"Now I must shoot these bacilli — these pure cultivations of

my bacilli — into healthy guinea -pigs, into all kinds of healthy

animals. If then these creatures get tuberculosis, I shall know

that my bacilli are necessarily and beyond all doubt the cause!”

That man with the terrible single-mindedness of a maniac

driven by a fixed idea changed his laboratory into the weird

est kind of zoo . He became grouchy to every one — to curious

visitors he was a sarcastic , spiteful little German ogre. Alone

he sterilized batteries of shining syringes and shot the crinkly

masses of microbes from the cultivations in his serum - jelly

tubes - he injected these bacilli ground up in a little pure water

into guinea -pigs and rabbits and hens and rats and mice and

monkeys. “That's not enough ! ” he growled, “ I'll try some

animals that never are known to have tuberculosis naturally.”

So he ranged abroad and gathered to his laboratory and injected

his beloved terrible bacilli into tortoises, sparrows, five frogs

and three eels .

Insanely Koch completed this most fantastic test by stick

ing his microbes from the serum cultivation into — a goldfish !

Days dragged by, weeks passed, and every day Koch walked

into his workshop in the morning and made straight for the

cages and jars that held these momentous animals. The gold

fish continued to open and shut his mouth and swim placidly

136 K OCH

about in his round - bellied bowl. The frogs croaked unconcern

edly and the eels kept all of their slippery liveliness; the tor

toise now and then stuck his head out of his shell and seemed

to wink an eye at Koch as if to say : " Your tubercle bugs are

food for me - give me some more."

But while his injections worked no harm to these creatures ,

that do not in the course of nature get consumption anyway

-at the same time the guinea -pigs began to droop, to lie piti

fully on their sides, gasping. One by one they died, their

bodies wasting terribly into tubercles. ...

Now Koch had forged the last link of the chain of his ex

periments and was ready to give his news to the world : The

bacillus, the true cause of tuberculosis, has been trapped , dis

covered ! When suddenly he decided there was one more thing

to do.

“ Human beings surely must catch these bacilli by inhaling

them , in dust, or from the coughing of people sick with con

sumption. I wonder, will healthy animals be infected that

way too ? " At once Koch began to devise ways of doing this

experiment — it was a nasty job. “ I'll have to spray the bacilli

from my cultivations at the animals, ” he pondered. But this

was a more serious business than turning ten thousand mur

derers out of jail. . .

Like the good hunter that he was, he took a chance with the

dangers that he couldn't avoid. He built a big box and put

guinea -pigs and mice and rabbits inside it and set this box in

the garden. Then through the window he ran a lead pipe that

opened in a spray nozzle inside the box, and for three days,

for half an hour each day, he sat in his laboratory, pumping

at a pair of bellows that shot a poisonous mist of bacilli into

the box - to be breathed by the cavorting beasts inside it.

In ten days three of the rabbits were gasping, fighting for

that precious air that their sick lungs could no longer give

them . In twenty - five days the guinea -pigs had done their

humble work - one and all they were dead, of tuberculosis.

Koch told nothing of the ticklish job it was to take these

THE DEATH FIGHTER 137

beasts out of their germ -soaked box — if I had been in his place

I would rather have handled a boxful of boa-constrictors

and he makes no mention of how he disposed of this little

house whose walls had been wet with this so -deadly spray .

What chances for making heroic flourishes were missed by

this quiet Koch !

VII

a

On the twenty -fourth of March in 1882 in Berlin there was

a meeting of the Physiological Society in a plain small room

made magnificent by the presence of the most brilliant men

of science in Germany. Paul Ehrlich was there and the most

eminent Professor Rudolph Virchow — who had but lately

sniffed at this crazy Koch and his alleged bacilli of disease

and nearly all of the famous German battlers against disease

were there.

A bespectacled wrinkled small man rose and put his face

close to his papers and fumbled with them . The papers quiv

ered and his voice shook a little as he started to speak. With

an admirable modesty Robert Koch told these men the plain

story of the way he had searched out the invisible assassin of

one human being out of every seven that died. With no

oratorical raisings of his voice he told these disease fighters

that the physicians of the world were now able to learn all of

the habits of this bacillus of tuberculosis — this smallest but

most savage enemy of men . Koch recited to them the lurking

places of this slim microbe, its strengths and weaknesses, and

he showed them how they might begin the fight to crush, to

wipe out this sub -visible deadly enemy.

At last Koch sat down, to wait for the discussion, the in

evitable arguments and objections that greet the finish of rev

olutionary papers. But no man rose to his feet, no word was

spoken, and finally eyes began to turn toward Virchow , the

oracle, the Tsar of German science, the thunderer whose mere

frown had ruined great theories of disease .

138 KOCH

All eyes looked at him, but Virchow got up, put on his hat,

and left the room - he had no word to say .

If old Leeuwenhoek, two hundred years before, had made

so astounding a discovery, Europe of the Seventeenth Century

would have heard the news in months. But in 1882 the news

that Robert Koch had found the microbe of tuberculosis

trickled out of the little room of the Physiological Society the

same evening, sang to Kamchatka and to San Francisco on

the cable wires that night, and exploded on the front pages of

the newspapers in the morning. Then the world went wild over

Koch, doctors boarded ships and hopped trains for Berlin to

learn from him the secret of hunting microbes; vast crowds

of them rushed to Berlin to sit at Koch's feet to learn how

to make beef-broth jelly and how to stick syringes full of

germs into the wiggling carcasses of guinea - pigs.

Pasteur's deeds had set France by the ears, but Koch's ex

periments with the dangerous tubercle bacilli rocked the earth,

and Koch waved worshipers away , saying:

“ This discovery of mine is not such a great advance. "

He tried to get away from his adorers and to dodge his

eager pupils, to snatch what moments he could for his own

new searchings. He loathed teaching — that way he was pre

cisely like Leeuwenhoek - but he was forced, cursing under

his breath, to give lessons in microbe hunting to Japanese who

spoke horrible German and understood less than they spoke,

and to Portuguese, who could never, by any amount of in

struction, learn to hunt microbes. He started a huge fight

with Pasteur — but of this I shall tell in the next chapter - and

between times he showed his assistant, Gaffky, how to spy on

and track down the bacillus of typhoid fever. He was forced

to attend idiotic receptions and receive medals, and came away

from these occasions to guide his fierce-mustached assistant

Loeffler, who was on the trail of the poison -dripping microbe

that kills babies with diphtheria. It was thus that Koch shook

the tree of his marvelous simple method of growing microbes

THE DEATH FIGHTER 139

>

on the surface of solid food - he shook the tree, as Gaffky said

long afterward , and discoveries rained into his lap .

In all of his writings I have never found any evidence that

Koch considered himself a great originator; never, like Pas

teur, did he seem to realize that he was the leader in the most

beautiful and one of the most thrilling battles of men against

cruel nature — there was no actor in this mussy -bearded little

man. But he did set under way an inspiring drama, a struggle

with the messengers of death that turned some of the microbe

hunting actors into maniac searchers, men who went to nearly

suicidal lengths, almost murderous extremes — to prove that

microbes were the cause of dangerous diseases.

Doctor Fehleisen , to take one instance, went out from Koch's

laboratory and found a curious little ball -shaped microbe,

hitched to its brothers in chains like the beads of a rosary – he

cultivated these bugs from skin gouged out of people sick with

erysipelas, that sky -rockety disease that used to be called St.

Anthony's Fire. On the theory that an attack of erysipelas

might cure cancer - a mad man's excusel - Fehleisen shot bil

lions of these chain microbes, now known as streptococci, into

people hopelessly sick with cancer. And in a few days each

one of these human experimental animals of his flamed red

with St. Anthony's Fire some collapsed dangerously and

nearly died - and so this desperado proved his case : That

streptococcus is the cause of erysipelas .

Another pupil of Koch was the now forgotten hero, Doctor

Garrè of Basel, who gravely rubbed whole test-tubes full of

another kind of microbe — which Pasteur had alleged was the

cause of boils — into his own arm. Garrè came down horribly

with an enormous carbuncle and twenty boils — the tremen

dous dose of microbes he shot into himself might easily have

finished him but he dismissed his danger as merely " un

pleasant” and shouted triumphantly : " I now know that this

microbe, this staphylococcus, is the true cause of boils and

carbuncles ! ”

140 KOCH

Meanwhile, at the end of 1882 , when Koch had finished his

virulent and partly comic wrangle with Pasteur, who was just

then with prodigious enthusiasm saving the lives of sheep and

cattle in France, the discoverer of the tubercle bacillus started

sniffing along the trail of one of the most delicate, the most

easy to kill, and yet the most terribly savage of all microbes.

In 1883 the Asiatic cholera knocked at the door of Europe.

This cholera had stolen out of its lurking place in India and

slipped mysteriously across the sea and over desert sands to

Egypt; suddenly a murderous epidemic of it exploded in

Alexandria and Europe across the Mediterranean was fright

ened. In Alexandria the streets were still with fear; the mur

derous virusno one had the slightest notion of what kind

of an invisible beast it was this virus, I say , sneaked into

healthy men in the morning, doubled them into knots of spasm

racked agony by afternoon, and put them to rest beyond the

reach of all pain by night.

Then a strange race started between Pasteur and Koch,

which meant between France and Germany, to search out the

microbe of this cholera that flared threatening on the horizon .

Koch and Gaffky went armed with microscopes and a me

nagerie of animals from Berlin ; Pasteur — who was desperately

busy struggling to conquer the mysterious microbe of hydro

phobia - sent the brilliant and devoted Émile Roux and the

silent Thuillier, youngest of the microbe hunters of Europe.

Koch and Gaffky worked forgetting to eat or sleep ; they toiled

in dreadful rooms cutting up the bodies of Egyptians dead of

cholera ; in their muggy laboratory with the air fairly drip

ping with a steamy heat, sweat dropping off the ends of their

noses on to the lenses of their microscopes, they shot stuff

from the tragic carcasses of just- dead Alexandrians into apes

and dogs and hens and mice and cats . But while these rival

teams of searchers hunted frantically the epidemic began te

fade away as mysteriously as it came. None of them had yet

found a microbe they could surely accuse, and all of them ,

there is a kind of twisted humor in this — grumbled as they

THE DEATH FIGHTER 141

saw death receding, their chance of trapping their prey slipping

from them .

Koch and Gaffky were getting ready to return to Berlin ,

when one morning a frightened messenger came to them and

told them : “ Dr. Thuillier, of the French Commission , is dead

of cholera ."

Koch and Pasteur hated each other sincerely and enthusi

astically, like the good patriots that they were, but now the

two Germans went to the bereaved Roux and offered their help

and their condolences ; and Koch was one of those that car

ried in a plain box to its last home the body of Thuillier, this

daring young Thuillier whom the miserably weak - but treach

erous — cholera microbe had turned upon and done to death

before he had ever had a chance to spy upon and trap it . At

the grave Koch laid wreaths upon the coffin : “ They are very

simple, ” he said, “ but they are of laurel, such as are given to

the brave.”

The funeral of this first of the martyred microbe hunters

over , Koch hurried back to Berlin with certain mysterious

boxes that held specimens, that he had painted with powerful

dyes, and these specimens had in them a curious microbe

shaped like a comma. Koch made his report to the Minister

of State: “ I have found a germ, ” he said, “ in all cases of

cholera ... but I haven't proved yet that it is the cause.

Send me to India where cholera is always smoldering — what I

have found justifies your sending me there.”

So Koch sailed from Berlin for Calcutta, with the fate of

Thuillier hanging over him, drolly chaperoning fifty mice and

dreadfully annoyed by seasickness. I have often wondered

what his fellow -passengers took him for - probably they

guessed that he was some earnest little missionary or a serious

professor intent to delve into ancient Hindu lore.

Koch found his comma bacillus in the dead bodies of every

one of the forty carcasses into which he peered, and he un

earthed the same microbe in the intestines of patients at the

moment the fatal disease hit them . But he never found this

142 KOC H

germ in any of the hundreds of healthy Hindus that he exam

ined , nor in any animal, from mice to elephants.

Quickly Koch learned to grow the comma bacillus pure on

beef-broth jelly, and once he had it imprisoned in his tubes

he studied all the habits of this vicious little vegetable, how

it perished quickly when he dried it the least bit , how it could

sneak into a healthy man by way of the soiled linen of patients

that had died. He dredged this comma microbe up out of the

stinking water of the tanks around which clustered the miser

able Hindu's huts - sad hovels from which drifted the moans

of helpless ones that were dying of cholera.

At last Koch sailed back to Germany, and here he was re

ceived like some returning victorious general. “ Cholera never

rises spontaneously, " he told his audience of learned doctors ;

“ no healthy man can ever be attacked by cholera unless he

swallows the comma microbe, and this germ can only develop

from its like it cannot be produced from any other thing, or

out of nothing. And it is only in the intestine of man , or in

highly polluted water like that of India that it can grow . "

It is thanks to these bold searchings of Robert Koch that

Europe and America no longer dread the devastating raids of

these puny but terrible little murderers from the Orient

and their complete extermination from the world waits only

upon the civilization and sanitation of India . ...

VIII

From the German Emperor's own hand Koch now received

the Order of the Crown, with Star, but in spite of that his

countrified hat continued to fit his stubbly head, and when ad

mirers adored him he only said to them : " I have worked as

hard as I could ... if my success has been greater than that

of most ...the reason is that I came in my wanderings

through the medical field upon regions where the gold was still

lying by the wayside . . . and that is no great merit. "

The hunters who believed that microbes were the chief foes

> >

THE DEATH FIGHTER 143

of man , these men were brave, but there was careless heroism

too among some of the ancient doctors and old -fogey sani

tarians who thought that all this new stuff about microbes was

claptrap and nonsense . Old Professor Pettenkofer of Munich

was the leader of the skeptics who were not convinced by

Koch's clear experiments, and when Koch came back from

India with those comma bacilli that he was sure were the au

thors of cholera Pettenkofer wrote him something like this :

"Send me some of your so -called cholera germs, and I'll show

you how harmless they are !”

Koch sent him on a tube that swarmed with wee virulent

comma microbes. And so Pettenkofer — to the great alarm of

all good microbe hunters - swallowed the entire contents of

the tube . There were enough billions of wiggling comma germs

in this tube to infect a regiment. Then he growled his scorn

through his magnificent beard, and said : “Now let us see it

I get cholera !” Mysteriously , nothing happened, and the

failure of the mad Pettenkofer to come down with cholera re

mains to this day an enigma, without even the beginning of

an explanation .

Pettenkofer, who was foolhardy enough to try such a possi

bly suicidal experiment, was also sufficiently cocksure to be

lieve that his drinking of the cholera soup had settled the

question in his favor. " Germs are of no account in cholera !"

shouted the old doctor. “ The important thing is the disposition

(whatever that means) of the individual!”

“There can be no cholera without the comma bacillus! ”

said Koch in reply.

“ But I have just swallowed millions of your alleged fatal

bacilli, and have not even had a cramp in my stomach !” came

back Pettenkofer in rebuttal.

As it is so often the case , alas, in violent scientific con

troversies, both sides were partly right and partly wrong.

Every event of the past forty years has shown that Koch was

right when he said that people can never have cholera without

swallowing his comma bacillus. And the years that have gone

144 KOCH

by have revealed that Pettenkofer's experiment pointed out a

mystery behind the curtains of the unknown, and these ob

scuring draperies have not now even begun to be lifted by

modern microbe hunters. Murderous germs are everywhere,

sneaking into all of us, yet they are able to assassinate only

some of us, and that question of the strange resistance of the

rest of us is still just as much an unsolved puzzle as it was in

those days of the roaring eighteen -eighties when men were

ready to risk dying to prove that they were right.

For, make no mistake, Pettenkofer walked within an inch

of death ; other microbe hunters have since then swallowed

cultures of virulent cholera microbes by accident — and died

horribly.

But we come to the end of the great days of Robert Koch,

and the exploits of Louis Pasteur begin once more to push

Koch and all other microbe hunters into the background of

the world's attention . Let us leave Koch while his ambitious

but well-meaning countrymen prepare, without knowing it, a

disaster for him, a tragedy that, alas, has partly tarnished

the splendor of his trapping of the microbes that murder ani

mals and men with anthrax and cholera and tuberculosis. But

before you read the perfect and brilliant finale of the gorgeous

career of Pasteur, I beg leave to remove my hat and make

bows of respect to Koch — the man who really proved that mi

crobes are our most deadly enemies, who brought microbe

hunting near to being a science, the man who is now the partly

forgotten captain of an obscure heroic age.

CHAPTER V

PASTEUR

AND THE MAD DOG

I

Do not think for a moment that Pasteur allowed his fame and

name to be forgotten in the excitement kicked up by the sen

sational proofs of Koch that microbes murder men. It is cer

tain that less of a hound for sniffing out microbes, less of a

poet, less of a master at keeping people wide -eyed with their

mouths open , would have been shoved off into a fairly com

plete oblivion by such events — but not Pasteur !

It was in the late eighteen -seventies — Koch had just swept

the German doctors off their feet by his fine discovery of the

spores of anthraxmthat Pasteur who was only a chemist, had

the effrontery to dismiss with a grunt, a shrug, and a wave of

his hand, the ten thousand years of experience of doctors in

studying and fighting diseases. At this time, in spite of Sem

melweis, the Austrian who had proved child -bed fever was

contagious, the Lying - In hospitals of Paris were pest -holes.

Out of every nineteen women who went hopeful into their

doors, one was sure to die of child -bed fever, to leave her

baby motherless. One of these places, where ten young moth

ers perished in succession, was called the House of Crime.

Women hardly dared to trust themselves to the most expensive

physicians; they were beginning to boycott the hospitals.

Large numbers of them — with reason — no longer cared to risk

the grim danger of having babies. Even the doctors them

selves - accustomed though they were helplessly but sympa

thetically to preside at the demise of their patients — even the 245

146 PA STEUR

physicians themselves, I say, were scandalized at this dreadful

presence of death at the birth of new life.

One day, at the Academy of Medicine in Paris, a famous

physician was holding an oration , with plenty of long Greek

and elegant Latin words , on the cause - alas, completely un

known to him - of child -bed fever. Suddenly one of his

learned and stately sentences was interrupted by a voice bel

lowing from the rear of the hall:

“ The thing that kills women with child -bed fever — it isn't

anything like that! It is you doctors that carry deadly mi

crobes from sick women to healthy ones ... ! ” It was Pas

teur who said this; he was out of his seat; his eyes flamed ex

citement.

"Possibly you are right, but I fear you will never find that

microbe-" The orator tried to start his speech again , but by

this time Pasteur was charging up the aisle, dragging his partly

paralyzed left leg behind him a little . He reached the blacka

board, grabbed a piece of chalk and shouted to the annoyed

orator and the scandalized Academy:

"You say I will not find the microbe ? Man, I have foundI

it ! Here's the way it looks !” And Pasteur scrawled a chain

of little circles on the blackboard . The meeting broke up in

confusion.

Pasteur was in his late fifties now, but he was still as im

petuous and enthusiastic as he had been at twenty - five. He

had been a chemist and an expert on beet -sugar fermentations,

he had shown the vintners how to keep their wines from spoil

ing, he had rushed from this job into the saving of sick silk

worms, he had preached the slogan of Better Beer for France

and had really made the French beer better ; but during all

these hectic years while he was doing the life work of a dozen

men Pasteur dreamed about the tracking down of microbes

that he knew must be the scourges of the human race, the au

thors of disease .

Then suddenly he found Koch had done the trick ahead of

him . He must catch up with this Koch . "Microbes are in

AND THE MAD DOG 147

a way mine — I was the first to show how important they were,

twenty years ago, when Koch was a child ..." you can

imagine Pasteur muttering. But there were difficulties in the

way of his catching up.

In the first place, Pasteur had never felt a pulse or told a

bilious man to stick out his tongue, it is doubtful if he could

have told a lung from a liver, and it is certain that he did not

know the first thing about how to hold a scalpel. As for those

cursed hospitals — phew ! The smell of them gave him nasty

feelings at the pit of his stomach, and he wanted to stop his

ears and run away from the moans that floated down their

dingy corridors. But presently — it was ever the way with

this unconquerable man — he got around his medical ignorance.

Three physicians, Joubert at first, and then Roux and Cham

berland became his assistants; youngsters they were, these

three, radicals who were Bolshevik against ancient idiotic

medical doctrines. They sat worshiping Pasteur at his un

popular lectures in the Academy of Medicine, believing every

one of his laughed -at prophecies of dreadful scourges caused

by sub -visible bugs. He took these boys into his laboratory

and in return they explained the machinery of animals' insides

to Pasteur, they taught him the difference between the needle

and the plunger of a hypodermic syringe and convinced him

- he was very squeamish about such things — that animals

like guinea - pigs and rabbits hardly felt the prick of the syringe

needle when he injected them . Privately these three men

swore to be his slaves — and the priests of this new

science.

Nothing is truer than that there is no one orthodox way of

hunting microbes, and the differences between the ways Koch

and Pasteur went at their work are the best illustrations of

this. Koch was as coldly logical as a text-book of geometry ,

he searched out his bacillus of tuberculosis with systematic

experiments, and he thought of all the objections that doubters

might make before such doubters knew that there was any

thing to bave doubts about. Koch always recited his failures

148 PASTEUR

with just as much and no more enthusiasm than he did his tri .

umphs. There was something inhumanly just and right about

him and he looked at his own discoveries as if they had been

those of another man of whom he was a little over -critical.

But Pasteur ! This man was a passionate groper whose head

was incessantly inventing right theories and wrong guesses

shooting them out like a display of village fireworks going off

bewilderingly by accident.

Pasteur started hunting microbes of disease and punched

into a boil on the back of the neck of one of his assistants and

grew a germ from it and was sure it was the cause of boils ;

he hurried from these experiments to the hospital to find his

chain microbes in the bodies of women dying with child -bed

fever ; from here he rushed out into the country to discover

--but not to prove it precisely — that earthworms carry an

thrax bacilli from the deep buried carcasses of cattle to the

surface of the fields. He was a strange genius who seemed

to need the energetic, gusto - ish doing of a dozen things at

the same time— more or less accurately - in order to discover

that grain of truth which lies at the bottom of most of his

work .

In this variety of simultaneous goings -on you can fairly

feel Pasteur fumbling at a way of getting ahead of Koch .

Koch had shown with beautiful clearness that germs cause dis

ease , there is no doubt about that - but this isn't the most im

portant thing to do ... this is nothing, this proof, the thing

to do is to find a way to prevent the germs from killing people,

to protect mankind from death ! “What impossible, what

absurd experiments didn't we discuss,” said Roux long after

this distressing time when Pasteur was stumbling about in the

dark . “We would laugh at them ourselves, next day.”

To understand Pasteur, it is important to know his wild

stabs and his failures as well as his triumphs. He had not the

precise methods of growing microbes pure — it took the patience

of Koch to devise such things — and one day to his disgust,

Pasteur observed that a bottle of boiled urine in which he hada

AND THE MAD DOG 149

planted anthrax bacilli was swarming with unbidden guests,

contaminating microbes of the air that had sneaked in . The

following morning he observed that there were no anthrax

germs left at all; they had been completely choked out by the

bacilli from the air.

At once Pasteur jumped to a fine idea : " If the harmless

bugs from the air choke out the anthrax bacilli in the bottle,

they will do it in the body too ! It is a kind of dog-eat-dog !”

shouted Pasteur, and at once he put Roux and Chamberland

to work on the fantastic experiment of giving guinea -pigs

anthrax and then shooting doses of billions of harmless mi

crobes into them - beneficent germs which were to chase the

anthrax bacilli round the body and devour them — they were

to be like the mongoose which kills cobras. .

Pasteur gravely announced : “ That there were high hopes

for the cure of disease from this experiment, ” but that is the

last you hear of it, for Pasteur was never a man to give the

world of science the benefit of studying his failures. But a

little later the Academy of Sciences sent him on a queer errand,

and on this mission he stumbled across a fact that gave him

the first clew to a genuine, a remarkable way of turning savage

microbes into friendly ones . It was an outlandish plan he

began to devise, to dream about, of turning living microbes

of disease against their own kind, so guarding animals and

men from invisible deaths. At this time there was a great to - do

about a cure for anthrax, invented by the horse doctor, Lou

vrier, in the Jura mountains in the east of France. Louvrier

had cured hundreds of cows who were at death's door, said

the influential men of the district : it was time that this treata

ment received scientific approval.

II

Pasteur arrived there, escorted by his young assistants, and

found that this miraculous cure consisted first, in having sev

eral farm hands rub the sick cow violently to make her as

150 PASTEUR

hot as possible; then long gashes were cut in the poor beast's

skin and into these cuts Louvrier poured turpentine; finally

the now bellowing and deplorably maltreated cow was cov

ered - excepting her face !—with an inch thick layer of un

mentionable stuff soaked in hot vinegar. This ointment was

kept on the animal — who now doubtless wished she were dead

-by a cloth that covered her entire body.

Pasteur said to Louvrier : "Let us make an experiment. All

cows attacked by anthrax do not die, some of them just get

better by themselves; there is only one way to find out, Doctor

Louvrier, whether or no it is your treatment that saves them .”

So four good healthy cows were brought, and Pasteur in the

presence of Louvrier and a solemn commission of farmers,

shot a powerful dose of virulent anthrax microbes into the

shoulder of each one of these beasts: this stuff would have

surely killed a sheep, it was enough to do to death a few dozen

guinea - pigs. The next day Pasteur and the commission and

Louvrier returned, and all the cows had large feverish swellings

on their shoulders, their breath came in snorts — they were in

a bad way, that was very evident.

“Now, Doctor, " said Pasteur, “ choose two of these sick

COWS — we'll call them A and B. Give them your new cure,

and we'll leave cows C and D without any treatment at all.”

So Louvrier assaulted poor A and B with his villainous treat

ment. The result was a terrible blow to the sincere would be

curer of cows, for one of the cows that Louvrier treated got

better - but the other perished; and one of the creatures that

had got no treatment at all , died - but the other got better.

" Even this experiment might have tricked us, Doctor," said

Pasteur. “ If you had given your treatment to cows A and D

instead of A and B — we all would have thought you had really

found a sovereign remedy for anthrax . "

Here were two cows left over from the experiment, beasts

that had had a hard siege of anthrax and got better from it :

“What shall I do with these two cows? " pondered Pasteur.

"Well, I might try shooting a still more savage strain of anthrax

AND THE MAD DOG 151

bacilli into them - I have one family of anthrax germs in Paris

that would give even a rhinoceros a bad night.”

So Pasteur sent to Paris for his vicious cultivation, and in

jected five drops into the shoulders of those two cows that had

got better. Then he waited , but nothing happened to the

beasts, not even a tiny swelling at the point where he had in

jected millions of poisonous bacilli; the cows remained per

fectly happy !

Then Pasteur jumped to one of his quick conclusions:

" Once a cow has anthrax, but gets better from it, all the

anthraxmicrobes in the world cannot give her another attack,

she is immune." This thought began playing and flitting

about in his head and made him wool-gather so that he did not

hear questions that Madame Pasteur asked him , nor see obvi

ous things at which his eyes looked directly .

“How to give an animal a little attack of anthrax, a safe

little attack that won't kill him , but will surely protect

him . There must be a way to do that. ... I must find a

way . ”

So it went with Pasteur for months and he kept saying to

Roux and Chamberland : " What mystery is there, like the

mystery of the non - recurrence of virulent maladies? ” He

went about muttering to himself : “ We must immunizewe

must immunize against microbes. . .

Meanwhile Pasteur and his faithful crew were training their

microscopes on stuff from men and animals dead of a dozen

different diseases; there was a kind of mixed-up fumbling in

this work between 1878 and 1880 — when one day fate, or

God , put a marvelous way to immunize right under Pasteur's

lucky nose. ( It is hard for me to give you this story exactly

straight because all of the various people who have written

about Pasteur tell it differently and Pasteur himself in his

scientific paper says nothing whatever about this remarkable

discovery having been a happy accident . ) But here it is , as

well as I can do, with certain gaps that I have had to fill in

myself.

152 PASTEUR

In 1880, Pasteur was playing with the very tiny microbe

that kills chickens with a malady known as chicken cholera ,

Doctor Peronçito had discovered this microbe, so tiny that it

was hardly more than a quivering point before the strongest

lens. Pasteur was the first microbe hunter to grow it pure, in

a soup that he cooked for it from chicken meat. And after he

had watched these dancing points multiply into millions in a

few hours, he let fall the smallest part of a drop of this bug

swarming broth onto a crumb of bread and fed this bread

to a chicken . In a few hours the unfortunate beast stopped

clucking and refused to eat, her feathers ruffled until she

looked like a fluffy ball, and the next day Pasteur came in to

find the bird tottering, its eyes shut in a kind of invincible

drowsiness that turned quickly into death .

Roux and Chamberland nursed these terrible wee microbes

along carefully ; day after day they dipped a clean platinum

needle into a bottle of chicken broth that teemed with germs

and then carefully shook the same still -wet needle into a fresh

flask of soup that held no microbe at all — so day after day

these transplantations went on - always with new myriads of

germs growing from the few that had come in on the moistened

needle. The benches of the laboratory became cluttered with

abandoned cultures, some of them weeks old. “We'll have to

clean this mess up to-morrow ," thought Pasteur.

Then the god of good accidents whispered in his ear, and

Pasteur said to Roux : “ We know the chicken cholera microbes

are still alive in this bottle ... they're several weeks old, it

is true . . . but just try shooting a few drops of this old

cultivation into some chickens. .

Roux followed these directions and the chickens promptly

got sick, turned drowsy, lost their customary lively frivolous

ness. But next morning, when Pasteur came into the labora

tory looking for these birds, to put them on the post-mortem

board — he was sure they would be dead - he found them per

fectly happy and gay!

“This is strange," pondered Pasteur, " always before this

O .

AND THE MAD DOG 153

O

the microbes from our cultivations have killed twenty chickens

out of twenty ... " But the time for his discovery was not

yet, and next day, after these strangely recovered chickens

had been put in charge of the caretaker, Pasteur and his family

and Roux and Chamberland went off on their summer vaca

tions. They forgot about those birds . ...

But at last one day Pasteur told the laboratory servant:

“Bring up some healthy birds, new chickens, and get them

ready for inoculation .”

“ But we only have a couple of unused chickens left, Mr.

Pasteur - remember, you used the last ones before you went

away — you injected the old cultures into them , and they got

sick but didn't die ? "

Pasteur made a few appropriate remarks about servants

who neglected to keep a good supply of fresh chickens on hand.

" Well, all right, bring up what new chickens you have left

and let's have a couple of those used ones too — the ones that

had the cholera but got better.

The squawking birds were brought up. The assistant shot

the soup with its myriads of germs into the breast muscles of

the chickens - into the new ones , and into the ones that had

got better ! Roux and Chamberland came into the laboratory

next morning - Pasteur was always there an hour or so ahead

of them , they heard the muffled voice of their master shouting

to them from the animal room below stairs:

"Roux, Chamberland, come down here- hurry !”

They found him pacing up and down before the chicken

cages. “ Look !” said Pasteur. “ The new birds we shot yester

day — they're dead all right, as they ought to be. .. But

now see these chickens that recovered after we shot them with

the old cultures last month . ... They got the same murder

ous dose yesterday — but look at them — they have resisted the

virulent dose perfectly they are gay .. they are eat

ing !”

Roux and Chamberland were puzzled for a moment.

Then Pasteur raved : “ But don't you see what this means ?

154 PASTEUR

Everything is found ! Now I have found out how to make a

beast a little sick ,just a little sick so that he will get better,

from a disease . ... All we have to do is to let our virulent

microbes grow old in their bottles ... instead of planting

them into new ones every day. . When the microbes age,

they get tame ... they give the chicken the disease ... but

only a little of it ... and when she gets better she can stand

all the vicious virulent microbes in the world . ... This is our

chance — this is my most remarkable discovery — this is a

vaccine I've discovered , much more sure, more scientific than

the one for smallpox where no one has seen the germ .

We'll apply this to anthrax too ... to all virulent dis

eases . We will save lives

.

.

.ןיי

III

A lesser man than Pasteur might have done this same acci

dental experiment — for this was no test planned by the human

brain - a lesser man might have done it and would have spent

years trying to explain to himself the mystery of it , but Pas

teur, stumbling on this chance protection of a couple of mis

erable chickens, saw at once a new way of guarding living

things against virulent germs, of saving men from death . His

brain jumped to a new way of tricking the hitherto inexorable

God who ruled that men must be helpless before the sneaking

attacks of his sub-visible enemies.

Pasteur was fifty -eight years old now, he was past his prime,

but with this chance discovery of the vaccine that saved

chickens from cholera, he started the six most hectic years of

his life, years of appalling arguments and unhoped -for tri

umphs and terrible disappointments — into these years , in short,

he poured the energy and the events of the lives of a hundred

ordinary men.

Hurriedly Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland set out to

confirm the first chance observation they had made. They

let virulent chicken cholera microbes grow old in their bottles

AND THE MAD DOG 155

of broth ; they inoculated these enfeebled bugs into dozens of

healthy chickens — which promptly got sick, but as quickly

recovered . Then triumphantly, a few days later, they watched

these birds — these vaccinated chickens - tolerate murderous in

jections of millions of microbes, enough to kill a dozen new

birds who were not immune.

Şo itwasthat Pasteur, ingeniously, turned microbes against

themselves. He tamed them first, and then he strangely used

them for wonderful protective weapons against the assaults

of their own kind.

And now Pasteur, with his characteristic impetuousness

after all it was only chickens he had learned to guard from

death so far – became more arrogant than ever with the old

fashioned doctors who talked Latin words and wrote shot- gun

prescriptions. He went to a meeting of the Academy of Medi

cine and with complaisance told the doctors how his chicken

vaccinations were a great advance on the immortal smallpox

discovery of Jenner: " In this case I have demonstrated a

thing that Jenner never could do in smallpox - and that is,

that the microbe that kills is the same one that guards the

animal from death !”

The old - fashioned blue -coated doctors were peeved at Pas

teur's appointing himself a god superior to the great Jenner;

Doctor Jules Guérin, the famous surgeon , became particu

larly sarcastic about Pasteur making so much of mere fussings

with chickens — and the fight was on. Pasteur, in a fury got up

and shouted remarks about the utter nonsensicality of one of

Guérin's pet operations, and there occurred a most scandalous

scene — it embarrasses me to have to tell about it — a strange

shambles in which Guérin , who was past eighty, rose from his

seat and was about to fall on the sixty -year-old Pasteur. The

old man aimed a wallop at Pasteur, but frantic friends jumped

in and prevented the impending fisticuffs of these two men

who thought they could settle the truth by kicks and blows

and mayhem .

Next day the ancient Guérin sent his seconds to Pasteur

156 PASTEUR

with a challenge to a duel, but Pasteur, evidently, did not care

to risk dying that way and he sent Guérin's friends to the Sec

retary of the Academy with this message: " I am ready, having

no right to act otherwise, to modify whatever the editors may

consider as going beyond the rights of criticism and legitimate

defense.” And so Pasteur once more proved himself to be a

human being — if not what is commonly called a man — by

backing out of the fight.

As I have told you before, Pasteur had a great deal of the

mystic in him. Often he bowed himself down before that mys

terious Infinite - he worshiped the Infinite when he was not

clutching at it like a baby reaching for the moon ; but fre

quently, the moment one of his beautiful experiments had

knocked another little chunk off that surrounding Unknown,

he made the mistake of believing that all mysteries had dis

solved away. It was so now — when he saw that he could

really protect chickens perfectly against a fatal illness by his

amazing trick of sticking a few of their own tamed assassins

into them . At once Pasteur guessed : "Maybe these fowl.

cholera microbes will guard chickens against othervirulent

diseases!” and promptly he inoculated some hens with his new

vaccine of weakened fowl cholera germs and then injected

them with some certainly murderous anthrax bacilli — and the

chickens did not die !

Wildly excited he wrote to Dumas, his old professor, and

hinted that the new fowl-cholera vaccine might be a wonder

ful Pan -Protector against all kinds of virulent maladies. " If

this is confirmed,” he wrote, “ we can hope for the most im

portant consequences, even in human maladies.”

Old Dumas, greatly thrilled, had this letter published in the

Reports of the Academy of Sciences, and there it stands, a sad

monument to Pasteur's impetuousness, a blot on his record

of reporting nothing but facts. So far as I can find, Pasteur

never retracted this error , although he soon found that a vac

cine made from one kind of bacillus does not protect an ani

mal against all diseases, but only — and then not absolutely

AND THE MAD DOG 157

surely — against the one disease of which the microbe in the

vaccine is the cause .

But one of Pasteur's most charming traits was his charac

teristic of a scientific Phoenix, who rose triumphantly from the

ashes of his own mistakes. When his imagination carried him

into the clouds you find him presently landing on the ground

with a bump — making clever experiments again , digging for

good true hard facts. So it is not surprising to find him, with

Roux and Chamberland, in 1881 , discovering a very pretty

way of taming vicious anthrax microbes and turning them into

a vaccine. By this time the quest after vaccines had become

so violent that Roux and Chamberland hardly had their Sun

days off, and never went on vacations; they slept at the lab

oratory to be near their tubes and microscopes and microbes.

And here, Pasteur directing them , they delicately weakened

anthrax bacilli so that some killed guinea -pigs, but not rabbits,

and others did mice to death , but were too weak to harm

guinea -pigs. They shot the weaker and then the stronger mi

crobes into sheep, who got a little sick but then recovered , and

after that these sheep could stand, apparently, the assaults of

vicious anthrax germs that were able to kill even a cow.

At once Pasteur told this new triumph to the Academy of

Sciences — he had left off going to the Academy of Medicine

after his brawl with Guérin — and he held out purple hopes to

them that he would presently invent ingenious vaccines that

would wipe out all diseases from mumps to malaria. “What is

more easy , " he shouted, " than to find in these successive

viruses a vaccine capable of making sheep and cows and horses

a little sick with anthrax without letting them perish — and so

preserving them from subsequent maladies ?” Some of Pas

teur's colleagues thought he was a little cocksure about this,

and they ventured to protest. Pasteur's veins stood out on

his forehead, but he managed to keep his mouth shut until he

and Roux were on the way home, when he burst out, speaking

really of all people who failed to see the absolute truth of his

idea :

158 PASTEUR

“ I would not be surprised if such a man were to be caught

beating his wife !”

Make no mistakescience was no cool collecting of facts

for Pasteur; in him it set going the same kind of machinery

that stirs the human animal to tears at the death of a baby

and makes him sing when he hears his uncle has died and left

him five hundred thousand dollars.

But enemies were on Pasteur's trail again . Just as he was

always stepping on the toes of physicians, so he had offended

the high and useful profession of the horse doctors, and one

of the leading horse doctors, the editor of one of the most im

portant journals of horse doctoring, his name was Doctor

Rossignol, cooked up a plot to lure Pasteur into a dangerous

public experiment and so destroy him. This Rossignol got up

with a great show of scientific fairness at the Agricultural So

ciety of Melun and said :

“ Pasteur claims that nothing is easier than to make a vac

cine that will protect sheep and cows absolutely from anthrax .

If that is true, it would be a great thing for French farmers,

who are now losing twenty million francs a year from this

disease . Well, if Pasteur can really make such magic stuff,

he ought to be willing to prove to us that he has the goods.

Let us get Pasteur to consent to a grand public experiment ; if

he is right, we farmers and veterinarians are the gainers — if

it fails, Pasteur will have to stop his eternal blabbing about

great discoveries that save sheep and worms and babies and

hippopotamuses !” Like this argued the sly Rossignol.

At once the Society raised a lot of francs to buy forty -eight

sheep and two goats and several cows and the distinguished

old Baron de la Rochette was sent to flatter Pasteur into this

dangerous experiment.

But Pasteur was not one bit suspicious . “ Of course I am

willing to demonstrate to your society that my vaccine is a

life -saver — what will work in the laboratory on fourteen sheep

will work on sixty at Melun ! ”

That was the great thing about Pasteur ! When he prepared

AND THE MAD DOG 159

to take the rabbit out of the hat, to astonish the world , he was

absolutely sincere about it ; he was a magnificent showman and

not below some small occasional hocus- pocus, but he was no

designing mountebank . And the public test was set for May

and June, that year.

Roux and Chamberland — who had begun to see animals that

were strange combinations of chickens and guinea -pigs in their

dreams, to drop important flasks, to lie awake injecting mil

lions of imaginary guinea -pigs, these fagged -out boys had just

started off on a vacation to the country — when they received

telegrams that brought them back to their exciting treadmill:

COME BACK PARIS AT ONCE ABOUT TO MAKE

PUBLIC DEMONSTRATION THAT OUR VACCINE

WILL PROTECT SHEEP AGAINST ANTHRAX - L . PAS

TEUR.

Something like that read these wires.

They hurried back . Pasteur said to them : "Before the

Agricultural Society of Melun, at the farm of Pouilly -le -Fort, I

am going to vaccinate twenty -four sheep, one goat and several

cattle_twenty -four other sheep, one goat and several

other cattle are going to be left without inoculation — then , at

the appointed time, I am going to inject all of the beasts with

the most deadly virulent culture of anthrax bacilli that we

have. The vaccinated animals will be perfectly protected

the not -vaccinated ones will die in two days of course ." Pas

teur sounded as confident as an astronomer predicting an

eclipse of the sun . . .

" But, master, you know this work is so delicate we cannot

be absolutely sure of our vaccines — they may kill some of the

sheep we try to protect- "

“WHAT WORKED WITH FOURTEEN SHEEP IN OUR

LABORATORY WILL WORK WITH FIFTY AT ME

LUN ! ” Pasteur roared at them. For him just then , there

was no such thing as a mysterious, tricky nature, an unknown

full of failures and surprises — the misty Infinite was as simple

as two plus two makes four to him just then. So there was

160 PASTEUR

nothing for Roux and Chamberland to do but to roll up their

sleeves and get the vaccines ready.

The day for the first injections came at last. Their bottles

and syringes were ready, their flasks were carefully labeled

" Be sure not to mix up the first and second vaccine, boys !”

shouted Pasteur, full of a gay confidence, as they left the Rue

d'Ulm for the train . As they came on the field at Pouilly -le

Fort, and strode toward the sheds that held the forty - eight

sheep, two goats and several cattle, Pasteur marched into the

arena like a matador, and bowed severely to the crowd. There

were senators of the Republic there, and scientists and horse

doctors and dignitaries, and hundreds of farmers ; and as Pas

teur walked among them with his little limp - it was however

a sort of jaunty limp — they cheered him mightily, many of

them , and some of them snickered.

And there was a flock of newspaper men there, including the

now almost legendary de Blowitz, of the London Times.

The sheep, fine healthy beasts, were herded into a clear

space ; Roux and Chamberland lighted their alcohol lamps

and gingerly unpacked their glass syringes and shot five drops

of the first vaccine - the anthrax bacilli that would kill mice

but leave guinea -pigs alive, into the thighs of twenty -four of

the sheep, one of the goats, and half of the cattle. The beasts

got up and shook themselves and were labeled by a little gouge

punched out of their ears. Then the audience repaired to a

shed where Pasteur harangued them for half an hour - telling

them simply but with a kind of dramatic portentousness of

these new vaccinations and the hopes they held out for suffer

ing men.

Twelve days went by and the show was repeated. The

crowd was there once more and the second vaccine — the

stronger one whose bacilli had the power of killing guinea -pigs

but not rabbits — was injected , and the animals bore up beau

tifully under it and scampered about as healthy sheep, goats

and cattle should do. The time for the fatal final test drew

near; the very air of the little laboratory became finicky ;

AND THE MAD DOG 161

the taut workers snapped at each other across the Bunsen

flames. Pasteur was never so appallingly quiet — and the bottle

washers fairly jumped across the room to fill his growled or

ders. Every day Thuillier, Pasteur's new youngest assistant,

went out to the farm to put his thermometer carefully under

the tails of the inoculated animals to see if they had fever - but

thank God, every one of them was standing up beautifully

under the heavy dose of the vaccine that was not quite mur

derous enough to kill rabbits.

While the heads of Roux and Chamberland turned several

hairs grayer, Pasteur kept his confidence, and he wrote, with

his old charmingly candid opinion of himself: " If success is

complete, this will be one of the finest examples of applied

science in this country, consecrating one of the greatest and

most fruitful discoveries ."

His friends shook their heads and lifted their shoulders and

murmured : " Napoleonic, my dear Pasteur," and Pasteur did

not deny it.

IV

Then on the fateful thirty - first of May all of the forty - eight

sheep , two goats, and several cattle — those that were vacci

nated and those to which nothing whatever had been done — all

of these received a surely fatal dose of virulent anthrax bugs,

Roux got down on his knees in the dirt, surrounded by his

alcohol lamps and bottles of deadly virus, and awed the crowd

by his cool flawless shooting of the poisonous stuff into the

more than sixty animals.

With his whole scientific reputation trusted to this one deli .

cate test , realizing at last that he had done the brave but terri

bly rash thing of letting a frivolous public judge his science,

Pasteur rolled and tossed around in his bed and got up fifty

times that night. He said absolutely nothing when Madame

Pasteur tried to encourage him and told him, “ Now now every

thing will come out all right” ; he sulked in and out of the lab.

162 PASTEUR

oratory ; there is no record of it, but without a doubt be

prayed.

Pasteur did not fancy going up in balloons and he would not

fight duels — but no one can question his absolute gameness

when he let the horse doctors get him into this dangerous test .

The crowd that came to judge Pasteur on the famous sec

ond day of June, 1881 , made the previous ones look like mere

assemblages at country baseball games . General Councilors

were here to -day as well as senators; magnificoes turned out

to see this show — tremendous dignitaries who only exhibited

themselves to the public at the weddings and funerals of kings

and princes. And the newspaper reporters clustered around

the famous de Blowitz.

At two o'clock Pasteur and his cohorts marched upon the

field and this time there were no snickers, but only a mighty

bellowing of hurrahs. Not one of the twenty - four vaccinated

sheep — though two days before millions of deadly germs had

taken residence under their hides — not one of these sheep, I

say, had so much as a trace of fever. They ate and frisked

about as if they had never been within a thousand miles of an

anthrax bacillus.

But the unprotected, the not vaccinated beasts — alas

there they lay in a tragic row, twenty -two out of twenty -four

of them ; and the remaining two were staggering about, at

grips with that last inexorable, always victorious enemy of all

living things. Ominous black blood oozed from their mouths

and noses.

“See ! There goes another one of those sheep that Pasteur

did not vaccinate ! ” shouted an awed horse doctor.

V

The Bible does not go into details about what the great

wedding crowd thought of Jesus when he turned water inte

wine , but Pasteur, that second of June, was the impresario of

a modern miracle as amazing as any of the marvels wrought

AND THE MAD DOG 103

by the Man of Galilee, and that day Pasteur's whole audience

—who many of them had been snickering skeptics — bowed

down before this excitable little half-paralyzed man who could

so perfectly protect living creatures from the deadly stings

of sub-visible invaders. To me this beautiful experiment at

Pouilly -le -Fort is an utterly strange event in the history of

man's fight against relentless nature. There is no record of

Prometheus bringing the precious fire to mankind amid ap

plause ; Galileo was actually clapped in prison for those search

ings that have done more than any other to transform the

world . We do not even know the names of those completely

anonymous genuises who first built the wheel and invented

sails and thought to tame a horse.

VI

But here stood Louis Pasteur, while his twenty -four im

mune sheep scampered about among the carcasses of the same

number of pitiful dead ones, here stood this man , I say, in a Ι

gruesomely gorgeous stage-setting of an immortal drama, and

all the world was there to see and to record and to be converted

to his own faith in his passionate fight against needless death.

Now the experiment turned into the likeness of a revival.

Doctor Biot, a healer in horses who had been one of the most

sarcastic of the Pasteur-baiters, rushed up to him as the last

of the not - vaccinated sheep was dying, and cried : " Inoculate

me with your vaccines, Mr. Pasteur - just as you have done

to those sheep you have saved so wonderfully- Then I

will submit to the injection of the murderous virus ! All men

must be convinced of this marvelous discovery !”

" It is true,” said another humbled enemy, “ that I have made

jokes about microbes, but I am a repentant sinner ! ”

" Well, allow me to remind you of the words of the Gospel, "

Pasteur answered him. “Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner

that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons

that need no repentance."

164 PASTEUR

The great de Blowitz cheered and rushed off to file his tele

gram to the London Times and to the newspapers of the world :

“ The experiment at Pouilly -le -Fort is a perfect, an unprec

edented success."

The world received this news and waited , confusedly be

lieving that Pasteur was a kind of Messiah who was going to

lift from men the burden of all suffering. France went wild

and called him her greatest son and conferred on him the Graná

Cordon of the Legion of Honor. Agricultural societies, horse

doctors, poor farmers whose fields were cursed with the poi

sonous virus of anthrax - all these sent telegrams begging him

for thousands of doses of the life-saving vaccine. And Pas

teur , with Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier, responded

to them with a magnificent disregard of their own health — and

of science. For Pasteur, poet that he was, had more faith than

the wildest of his new converts in this experiment.

In answer to these telegrams Pasteur turned the little lab

oratory in the Rue d'Ulm into a vaccine factory - huge kettles

bubbled and simmered with the broth in which the tame, the

life-saving, anthrax bacilli were to grow. Delicately — but so

frantically that it was not quite delicate enough - Roux and

Chamberland worked at weakening the murderous bacilli just

enough to make the sheep of France a little sick, but not too

sick from anthrax. Then all of them sweat at pouring

numerous gallons of this bacillus-swarming soup which was the

vaccine, into little bottles, a few ounces to each bottle , into

clean bottles that had to be absolutely free from all other

germs. And they had to do this subtle job without any proper

apparatus whatever. I marvel that Pasteur ever attempted it ;

surely there never has been such blind confidence raised by

one clear — but Lord ! it might be simply a lucky - experiment.

In moments snatched from this making of vaccine Roux and

Chamberland and Thuillier scurried up and down the land of

France, and even to Hungary. They inoculated two hundred

sheep in this place and five hundred and seventy -six in that

in less than a year hundreds of thousands of beasts had got

AND THE MAD DOG 165

this life-saving stuff. These wandering vaccinators would drag

themselves back into the laboratory from their hard trips,

they would get back to Paris probably wanting to get a few

drinks or spend an evening with a pretty girl or loaf over a

pipebut Pasteur could not stand the smell of tobacco smoke,

and as for wine and women , were not the sheep of France

literally baa-ing to be saved ? So these young men who were

slaves of this battler whose one insane thought was " find -the

microbe-kill-the -microbe " —these faithful fellows took off their

coats and peered at anthrax bacilli through the microscopes

until their eye rims got red and their eyelashes fell out . In

the middle of this work — with the farmers of France yelling

for more vaccine - they began to have strange troubles : con

taminating germs that had no business there began to pop up

among the anthrax bacilli; all at once a weak vaccine that

should have just killed a mouse began to knock off large rab

bits. . . . Then, just as the scientific desperadoes got these

messes straightened out, Pasteur would come in, nagging at

them , fuming, fussing because they took so long at their ex

periments.

He wanted to try to find the deadly virus of hydrophobia.

And now at night the chittering of the guinea -pigs and the

scurrying fights of the buck-rabbits in their cages were

drowned by the eerie noise of mad dogs howling - sinister

howls that kept Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier from

sleep. . . . What would Pasteur ever have done - he surely

would never have got far in his fight with the messengers of

death - without those fellows Roux and Chamberland and

Thuillier ?

Gradually, it was hardly a year after the miracle of Pouilly

le -Fort, it began to be evident that Pasteur, though a most

original microbe hunter, was not an infallible God . Disturb

ing letters began to pile up on his desk ; complaints from Mont

pothier and a dozen towns of France, and from Packisch and

Kapuvar in Hungary . Sheep weredying from anthrax - not

natural anthrax they had picked up in dangerous fields, but

.

166 PASTEUR

.

anthrax they had gotfrom those vaccines that were meant to

save them . From other places came sinister stories of how

the vaccine had failed to work — the vaccine had been paid for,

whole flocks of sheep had been injected, the farmers had gone

to bed breathing Thank -God -For-Our-Great-Man - Pasteur, only

to wake up in the morning to find their fields littered with the

carcasses of dead sheep, and these sheep — which ought to

have been immune — had died from the lurking anthrax spores

that lay in their fields.

Pasteur began to hate to open his letters; he wanted to stop

his ears against snickers that sounded from around corners,

and then — the worst thing that could possibly happen - came

a cold terribly exact scientific report from the laboratory of

that nasty little German Koch in Berlin, and this report ripped

the practicalness of the anthrax vaccine to tatters . Pasteur

knew that Koch was the most accurate microbe hunter in the

world .

There is no doubt that Pasteur lost some sleep from this

aftermath of his glorious discovery, but, God rest him , he was

a gallant man. It was not in him to admit, either to the public

or to himself, that his sweeping claims were wrong.

" Have not I said that my vaccines made sheep a little sick

with anthrax, but never killed them, and protected them per

fectly ? Well, I must stick to that, ” you can hear him mutter

between his teeth .

What a searcher this Pasteur was, and yet how little of that

fine selfless candor of Socrates or Rabelais is to be found in

him. But he is not in any way to be blamed for that, for

those two last were only, in their way, looking for truth , while

Pasteur's work carried him more and more into the frantic

business of saving lives, and in this matter truth is not of the

first importance.

In 1882 , while his desk was loaded with reports of disasters,

Pasteur went to Geneva, and there before the cream of dis

ease - fighters of the world he gave a thrilling speech, subject :

" How to guard living creatures from virulent maladies by

AND THE MAD DOG 167

injecting them with weakened microbes.” Pasteur assured

them that: “ The general principles have been found and one

cannot refuse to believe that the future is rich with the great

est hopes.”

“We are all animated with a superior passion, the passion

for progress and for truth !” he shouted — but unhappily he

said no word about those numerous occasions when his vac

cine had killed sheep instead of protecting them .

At this meeting Robert Koch sat blinking at Pasteur behind

his gold -rimmed spectacles and smiling under his weedy beard

at such an unscientific inspirational address. Pasteur seemed

to feel something hanging over him, and he challenged Koch

to argue with him publicly - knowing that Koch was a much

better microbe hunter than an argufier. " I will content my

self with replying to Mr. Pasteur's address in a written paper ,

in the near future,” said Koch — who coughed, and sat down.

In a little while this reply appeared . It was dreadful. In

this serio -comic answer Dr. Koch began by remarking that he

had obtained some of this precious so -called anthrax vaccine

from the agent of Mr. Pasteur.

Did Mr. Pasteur say that his first vaccine would kill mice,

but not guinea-pigs ? Dr. Koch had tested it , and it wouldn't

even kill mice. But some queer samples of it killed sheep !

Did Mr. Pasteur maintain that his second vaccine killed

guinea -pigs but not rabbits ? Dr. Koch had carefully tested

this one too, and found that it often killed rabbits very

promptly — and sometimes sheep, poor beasts ! which Mr. Pas

teur claimed it would guard from death .

Did Mr. Pasteur really believe that his vaccines were really

pure cultivations containing nothing but anthrax microbes ?

Dr. Koch had studied them carefully and found them to be

veritable menageries of hideous scum-forming bacilli and

strange cocci and other foreign creatures that had no business

there.

Finally, was Mr. Pasteur really burning so with a passion

for truth ? Then why hadn't he told of the bad results as well

168 PASTEU R

as the good ones, that had followed the wholesale use of his

vaccine ?

"Such goings-on are perhaps suitable for the advertising of

a business house, but science should reject them vigorously , ”

finished Koch, drily, devastatingly.

Then Pasteur went through the roof and answered Koch's

cool facts in an amazing paper with arguments that would not

have fooled the jury of a country debating society. Did Koch

dare to make believe that Pasteur's vaccines were full of con

taminating microbes ? “For twenty years before Koch's

scientific birth in 1876, it has been my one occupation to iso

late and grow microbes in a pure state, and therefore Koch's

insinuation that I do not know how to make pure cultivations

cannot be taken seriously !” shouted Pasteur.

The French nation , even the great men of the nation, patri

otically refused to believe that Koch had demoted their hero

from the rank of God of Science — what could you expect from

a German anyway ?-and they promptly elected Pasteur to the

Académie Française, the ultimate honor to bestow on a French

man . And on the day of Pasteur's admission this fiery yes -man

was welcomed to his place among the Immortal Forty by the

skeptical genius, Ernest Renan, the author who had changed

Jesus from a God into a good human being, a man who could

forgive everything because he understood everything. Renan

knew that even if Pasteur sometimes did suppress the truth ,

he was still sufficiently marvelous. Renan was not a scientist

but he was wise enough to know that Pasteur had done a won

derful thing when he showed that weak bugs may protect liv

ing beings against virulent ones, even if they would not do

it one hundred times out of one hundred .

Regard these two fantastically opposite men facing each

other on this solemn day. Pasteur the go -getter, an energetic

fighter full of a mixture of faiths that interfered, sometimes,

with ultimate - and maybe ugly - truth. And talking to him

loftily sits the untroubled Renan with the massiveness of

Mount Everest, such a dreadful skeptic that he probably was

AND THE MAD DOG 169

never quite convinced that he was himself alive, so firmly doubt

ing the value of doing anything that he had become one of the

fattest men in France.

Renan called Pasteur a genius and compared him to some

of the greatest men that ever lived and then gave the excited,

paralyzed, gray -haired, microbe hunter this mild admonition :

“Truth, Sir, is a great coquette; she will not be sought with

too much passion , but often is most amenable to indifference.

She escapes when apparently caught, but gives herself up if

patiently waited for ; revealing herself after farewells have

been said, but inexorable when loved with too much fervor. ”

Surely Renan was too wise to think that his lovely words

would ever change Pasteur one jot from the headlong untruth

ful hunter after truth that he was. But just the same, these

words sum up the fundamental sadness of Pasteur's life, they

tell of the crown of thorns that madmen wear whose dream it

is to change a world in the little seventy years they are allowed

to live.

VII

And now Pasteur began - God knows why — to stick little

hollow glass tubes into the gaping mouths of dogs writhing

mad with rabies . While two servants pried apart and held

open the jowls of a powerful bulldog, Pasteur stuck his beard

within a couple of inches of those fangs whose snap meant the

worst of deaths, and, sprinkled sometimes with a maybe fatal

spray, he sucked up the froth into his tube — to get a specimen

in which to hunt for the microbe of hydrophobia. I wish to

forget, now, everything that I have said about his showman

ship, his unsearcherlike go - gettings. This business of his

gray eyes looking that bulldog in the mouth - this was no

grandstand stuff.

Why did Pasteur set out to trap the germ of rabies ? That

is a mystery, because there were a dozen other serious dis

eases , just then, whose microbes had not yet been found, dis

170 PASTEUR

eases that killed many more people than rabies had ever put

to death, diseases that were not nearly so surely deadly to an

adventurous experimenter as rabies would be — if one of those

dogs should get loose. .

It must have been the artist, the poet in him that urged him

on to this most hard and dangerous hunting, for Pasteur him

self said : " I have always been haunted by the cries of those

victims of the mad wolf that came down the street of Arbois

when I was a little boy. . .” Pasteur knew the way the yells

of a mad dog curdle the blood of every one. He remembered

that less than a hundred years before in France, laws had to

be passed against the poisoning, the strangling, the shooting of

wretched people whom frightened fellow-townsmen just sus

pected of having rabies. Doubtless he saw himself the de

liverer of men from such crazy fear - such hopeless suffering.

And then , in this most magnificent and truest of all his

searchings, Pasteur started out, as he so often did, by mak

ing mistakes. In the saliva of a little child dying from hydro

phobia he discovered a strange motionless germ that he gave

the unscientific name of “microbe-like-an-eight.” He read

papers at the Academy that hinted about this figure-eight germ

having something to do with the mysterious cause of hydro

phobia. But in a little while this trail proved to be a blind

one, for with Roux and Chamberland he found — after he had

settled down and got his teeth into this search — that this eight

microbe could be found in the mouths of many healthy people

who had never been anywhere near a mad dog.

Presently, late in 1882 , he ran on to his first clew . " Mad

dogs are scarce just now, old Bourrel the veterinarian brings

me very few of them , and people with hydrophobia are still

harder to get hold of - we've got to produce this rabies in ani

mals in our laboratory and keep it going there — otherwise we

won't be able to go on studying it steadily , " he pondered.

He was more than sixty, and he was tired .

Then one day, a lassoed mad dog was brought into the lab

oratcr ; dangerously 'ne was slid into a big cage with healthy

AND THE MAD DOG 171

a

dogs and allowed to bite them . Roux and Chamberland fished

froth out of the mouth of this mad beast and sucked it up into

syringes and injected this stuff into rabbits and guinea -pigs.

Then they waited eagerly to see this menagerie develop the

first signs of madness. Sometimes — alas — the experiment

worked, but other very irritating times it did not; four healthy

dogs had been bitten and six weeks later they came in one

morning to find two of these creatures lashing about their

cages , howling - but for months after that the other two showed

no sign of rabies ; there was no rime or reason to this business,

no regularity, confound it ! this was not science ! And it was

the same with the guinea -pigs and rabbits : two of the rabbits

might drag out their hind legs with a paralysis — then die in

dreadful convulsions, but the other four would go on chewing

their greens as if there were no mad - dog virus within a million

miles of them .

Then one day a little idea came to Pasteur, and he hurried

to tell it to Roux.

“ This rabies virus that gets into people by bites, it settles

in their brains and spinal cords. . . . All the symptoms of

hydrophobia show that it's the nervous system that this virus

- this bug we can't find - attacks. ...

“ That's where we have to look for the unknown microbe

... that's where we can grow it maybe, even without seeing

it ... maybe we could use the living animal's brain instead

of a bottle of soup ... a funny culture- bottle that would be,

but. ...

"When we inject it under the skin — the virus may get lost in

the body before it can travel to the brain - if I could only stick

· it right into a dog's brain ... !”

Roux listened to these dreamings of Pasteur, he listened

bright-eyed to these fantastic imaginings. ... Another man

than Roux might have thought Pasteur completely crazy . ...

The brain of a dog or rabbit instead of a bottle of broth , in

deed ! What nonsense ! But not to Roux !

“ But why not put the virus right into a dog's brain , master,

a

.

172 PASTEUR

.

>

I can trephine a dog – I can drill a little hole in his skull

without hurting him — without damaging his brain at all

it would be easy ." said Roux.

Pasteur shut Roux up, furiously. He was no doctor, and he

did not know that surgeons can do this operation on human

beings even, quite safely. “What ! bore a hole right through

a dog's skull — why, you'd hurt the poor beast terribly

you would damage his brain you would paralyze him

No ! I will not permit it . ”

So near was Pasteur, by reason of his tender-heartedness,

so close was he to failing completely in winning to the most

marvelous of his gifts to men . He quailed before the stern ex

periment that his weird idea demanded. But Roux — the faith

ful , the now almost forgotten Roux - saved him by disobeying

him .

For, a few days later when Pasteur left the laboratory to

go to some meeting or other, Roux took a healthy dog, put him

easily out of pain with a little chloroform , and bored a hole

in the beast's head and exposed his palpitating, living brain.

Then up into a syringe he drew a little bit of the ground - up

brain of a dog just dead with rabies : “ This stuff must be

swarming with those rabies microbes that are maybe too small

for us to see,” he pondered ; and through the hole in the sleep

ing dog's skull went the needle of the syringe, and into the liv

ing brain Roux slowly , gently shot the deadly rabid stuff. ..

Next morning Roux told Pasteur about it " What! "

shouted Pasteur. “Where is the poor creature . . . he must

be dying paralyzed. ..."

But Roux was already down the stairs, and in an instant ho

was back, his operated dog prancing in ahead of him, jumping

gayly against Pasteur, sniffing 'round among the old broth bot

tles under the laboratory benches. Then Pasteur realized

Roux's cleverness and the new road of experiment that lay

before him, and though he was not fond of dogs, his joy made

him fuss over this one : “Good dog, excellent beast!” Pasteur

.

AND THE MAD DOG 173

>

1

said, and dreamed : "This beast will show that my idea will

work.

Sure enough, less than two weeks later the good creature

began to howl mournful cries and ear up his bed and gnaw at

his cage — and in a few days more he was dead, and this brute

died, as you will see, so that thousinds of mankind might live .

Now Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland had a sure way ,

that worked one hundred times out of one hundred, of giving

rabies to their dogs and guinea-pigs and rabbits. “ We cannot

find the microbe - surely it must be too tiny for the strongest

microscope to show us — there's no way to grow it in flasks of

soup ... but we can keep it alive — this deadly virus — in the

brains of rabbits ... that is the only way to grow it ,” you

can hear Pasteur telling Roux and Chamberland.

Never was there a more fantastic experiment in all of microbe

hunting, or in any science, for that matter; never was there a

more unscientific feat of science than this struggling, by Pas

teur and his boys, with a microbe they couldn't see - a weird

bug of whose existence they only knew by its invisible growth

in the living brains and spinal cords of an endless succession

of rabbits and guinea -pigs and dogs. Their only knowledge

that there was such a thing as the microbe of rabies was the

convulsive death of the rabbits they injected, and the fearful

cries of their trephined dogs. . .

Then Pasteur and his assistants started on their outlandish

—any wise man would say their impossible - adventure of tam-

ing this vicious virus that they could not see. There were little

interruptions ; Roux went with Thuillier to fight the cholera in

Egypt and there, you will remember, Thuillier died ; and Pas

teur went out into the rural pig -sties of France to discover the

microbe and find a vaccine against a disease that was just thena

murdering French swine. But Pasteur stopped getting en

tangled in those vulgar arguments which were so often to his

discredit , and the three of them locked themselves in their

laboratory in the Rue d'Ulm with their poor paralyzed and

174 PASTEUR

dangerous animals. They sweat through endless experiments.

Pasteur mounted guard over his young men and kept their

backs bent over their bench's as if they were some higher kind

of galley slave . He watched their perilous experiments with

one eye and kept the other on the glass door of the workroom,

and when he saw some of Roux's and Chamberland's friends

approaching, to ask them maybe to come out for a glass of beer

on the terrace of a near -by café, the master would hurry out

and tell the interlopers : "No. No ! Not now ! Cannot you

see ? They are busy — it is a most important experiment they

are doing !”

Months - gray months went by during which it seemed to

all of them that there was no possible way of weakening the

invisible virus of rabies. . . . One hundred animals , alas , out..

of every hundred that they injected — died. You would think

that Roux and Chamberland, still youngsters, would have been

the indomitable ones, the never-say -die men of this desperate

crew . But on the contrary !

" l ! 's no go, master, ” said they, making limp waves of their

hands toward the cages with their paralyzed beasts — toward

the tangled jungles of useless tubes and bottles. .

Then Pasteur's eyebrows cocked at them , and his thinning

gray hair seemed to stiffen : “ Do the same experiment over

again — no matter if it failed last time— it may look foolish to

you, but the important thing is not to leave the subject!” Pas

teur shouted, in a fury. So it was that this man scolded his

monkish disciples and prodded them to do useless tests over

and over and over - with no reasons, with complete lack of

logic. With every fact against him Pasteur searched and tried

and failed and tried again with that insane neglect of common

sense that sometimes turns hopeless causes into victories.

Indeed, why wasn't this setting out to tame the hydrophobia

virus — why wasn't it a nonsensical wild -goose chase ? There

was in all human history no single record of any man or beast

getting better from this horrible malady, once the symptoms

had declared themselves, once the mysterious messengers of

>

AND THE MAD DOG 175

evil had wormed their unseen way into the spinal cord and

brain . It was this kind of murderous stuff that Pasteur and

his men balanced on the tips of their knives, sucked up into

their glass pipettes within an inch from the lips - stuff that was

separated from their mouths by a thin little wisp of cotton .

Then, one exciting day, the first sweet music of encourage

ment came to these gropers in the dark — one of their dogs

inoculated with the surely fatal stuff from a rabid rabbit's brain

-this dog came down with his weird barkings and portentous

shiverings and slatherings — and then miraculously got com

pletely better ! Excitedly, a few weeks later, they shot this

first of all recovered beasts with a deadly virus, directly into his

brain they injected the wee murderers. The little wound on

his head healed quickly — anxiously Pasteur waited for his

doomful symptoms to come on him , but these signs never came.

For months the dog romped about his cage. He was absolutely

immune !

"Now we know it - we know we have a chance . ... When

a beast once has rabies and gets better from it , there will be

no recurrence . We must find a way to tame the virus

now ,” said Pasteur to his men, who agreed, but were perfectly

certain that there was no way to tame that virus.

But Pasteur began inventing experiments that no god would

have attempted ; his desk was strewn with hieroglyphic scrawls

of them. And at eleven in the morning, when the records of

the results of the day before had been carefully put down, he

would call Roux and Chamberland, and to them he would read

off some wild plan for groping after this unseen unreachable

virus — some fantastic plan for getting his fingers on it inside

the body of a rabbit — to weaken it .

“Try this experiment to -day ! ” Pasteur would tell them .

“ But that is technically impossible!” they protested .

" No matter - plan it any way you wish, provided you do it

well, ” Pasteur replied . (He was , those days, like old Ludwig

van Beethoven writing unplayable horn parts for his sym

phonies — and then miraculously discovering hornblowers to

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play those parts.) For, one way or another, the ingenious

Roux and Chamberland devised tricks to do those crazy ex

periments.

And at last they found a way of weakening the savage hydro

phobia virus — by taking out a little section of the spinal cord

of a rabbit dead of rabies , and hanging this bit of deadly stuff

up to dry in a germ -proof bottle for fourteen days. This

shriveled bit of nervous tissue that had once been so deadly

they shot into the brains of healthy dogs — and those dogs did

not die.

“ The virus is dead - or better still very much weakened, "

said Pasteur, jumping at the latter conclusion with no sense or

reason. "Now we'll try drying other pieces of virulent stuff for

twelve days — ten days — eight days — six days, and see if we

can't just give our dogs a little rabies . . . then they ought to

be immune...

Savagely they fell to this long will o' the wisp of an experi

ment. For fourteen days Pasteur walked up and down the

bottle and microscope and cage- strewn unearthly workshop and

grumbled and fretted and made scrawls in that everlasting

notebook of his . The first day the dogs were dosed with the

weakened the almost extinct virus that had been dried for

fourteen days; the second day they received a shot of the

slightly stronger nerve stuff that had been thirteen days in its

bottle; and so on until the fourteenth day — when each beast

was injected with one -day -dried virus that would have surely

killed a not - inoculated animal.

For weeks they waited — hair graying again — for signs of

rabies in these animals, but none ever came. They were happy,

these ghoulish fighters of death ! Their clumsy terrible four

teen vaccinations had not hurt the dogs — but were they im

mune?

Pasteur dreaded it - if this failed all of these years of work

had gone for nothing, and " I am getting old, old ..." you can

hear him whispering to himself. But the test had to be made.

Would the dogs stand an injection of the most deadly rabid

AND THE MAD DOG 1799

virus - right into their brains - a business that killed an ordi

nary dog one hundred times out of one hundred ?

Then one day Roux bored little holes through the skulls of

two vaccinated dogs — and two not vaccinated ones : and into

all four went a heavy dose of the most virulent virus. .

One month later, Pasteur and his men , at the end of three

years of work, knew that victory over hydrophobia was in their

hands. For, while the two vaccinated dogs romped and sniffed

about their cages with never a sign of anything ailing them

the two that had not received the fourteen protective doses of

dried rabbit's brain — these two had howled their last howls and

died of rabies .

Now immediately — the life -saver in this man was always

downing the mere searcher - Pasteur's head buzzed with plans

to wipe hydrophobia from the earth , he had a hundred foolish

projects, and he walked in a brown world of thought, in a mist

of plans that Roux and Chamberland, and not even Madame

Pasteur could penetrate. It was 1884, and when Pasteur for

got their wedding anniversary, the long -suffering lady wrote to

her daughter:

" Your father is absorbed in his thoughts, talks little , sleeps

little, rises at dawn, and, in one word , continues the life I began

with him this day thirty -five years ago.”

At first Pasteur thought of shooting his weakened rabies

virus into all the dogs of France in one stupendous Napoleonic

series of injections: “ We must remember that no human being

is ever attacked with rabies except after being bitten by a rabid

dog. ... Now if we wipe it out of dogs with our vaccine

he suggested to the famous veterinarian , Nocard, who laughed,

and shook his head .

“ There are more than a hundred thousand dogs and hounds

and puppies in the city of Paris alone, ” Nocard told him, " and

more than two million, five hundred thousand dogs in all of

France - and if each of these brutes had to get fourteen shots

of your vaccine fourteen days in a row where would you

get the men? Where would you get the time? Where the?

178 PASTEU R

>

ER O

devil would you get the rabbits ? Where would you get sick

spinal cord enough to make one-thousandth enough vaccine ? ”

Then finally there dawned on Pasteur a simple way out of

his trouble : " It's not the dogs we must give our fourteen doses

of vaccine, " he pondered, “ it's the human beings that have

been bitten by mad dogs. ..

“ How easy ! After a person has been bitten by a mad

dog, it is always weeks before the disease develops in him...

The virus has to crawl all the way from the bite to the brain .

While that is going on we can shoot in our fourteen doses

. and protect him ! ” and hurriedly Pasteur called Roux and

Chamberland together, to try it on the dogs first.

They put mad dogs in cages with healthy ones, and the mad

dogs bit the normal ones .

Roux injected virulent stuff from rabid rabbits into the

brains of other healthy dogs.

Then they gave these beasts, certain to die if they were

left alone — they shot the fourteen stronger and stronger doses

of vaccine into them . It was an unheard -of triumph ! For

every one of these creatures lived - threw off perfectly, mys

teriously, the attacks of their unseen assassins, and Pasteur

who had had a bitter experience with his anthrax inoculations

-asked that all of his experiments be checked by a commis

sion of the best medical men of France, and at the end of these

severe experiments the commission announced :

" Once a dog is made immune with the gradually more viru

lent spinal cords of rabbits dead of rabies, nothing on earth

can give him the disease.”

From all over the world came letters, urgent telegrams, from

physicians, from poor fathers and mothers who were waiting

terror -smitten for their children , mangled by mad dogs, to die

frantic messages poured in on Pasteur, begging him to send

them his vaccine to use on threatened humans. Even the mag

nificent Emperor of Brazil condescended to write Pasteur, beg

ging him ...

And you may guess how Pasteur was worried ! This was no

AND THE MAD DOG 179

2

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.

affair like anthrax, where, if the vaccine was a little, just a

shade too strong, a few sheep would die. Here a slip meant

the lives of babies. . . . Never was any microbe hunter faced

with a worse riddle. “ Not a single one of all my dogs has ever

died from the vaccine, ” Pasteur pondered. “ All of the bitten

ones have been perfectly protected by it . ... It must work

the same way on humans — it must but ..."

And then sleep once more was not to be had by this poor

searcher who had made a too wonderful discovery. . . . Hor

rid pictures of babies crying for the water their strangled

throats would not let them drink - children killed by his own

hands — such visions floated before him in the dark.

For a moment the actor, the maker of grand theatric ges

tures, rose in him again : “ I am much inclined to begin on my

self — inoculating myself with rabies, and then arresting the

consequences ; for I am beginning to feel very sure of my re

sults,” he wrote to his old friend , Jules Verçel.

At last, mercifully, the worried Mrs. Meister from Meissen

gott in Alsace took the dreadful decision out of Pasteur's un

sure hands. This woman came crying into the laboratory,

leading her nine-year-old boy, Joseph, gashed in fourteen

places two days before by a mad dog. He was a pitifully whim

pering, scared boy - hardly able to walk .

" Save my little boy - Mr. Pasteur,” this woman begged him.“

Pasteur told the woman to come back at five in the evening,

and meanwhile he went to see the two physicians, Vulpian and

Grancher - admirers who had been in his laboratory, who had

seen the perfect way in which Pasteur could guard dogs from

rabies after they had been terribly bitten. That evening they

went with him to see the boy, and when Vulpian saw the angry

festering wounds he urged Pasteur to start his inoculations:

“ Go ahead,” said Vulpian, “ if you do nothing it is almost sure

that he will die ."

And that night of July 6, 1885 , they made the first injection

of the weakened microbes of hydrophobia into a human being.

Then, day after day, the boy Meister went without a hitch

180 PASTEUR

through his fourteen injections which were only slight pricks

of the hypodermic needle into his skin .

And the boy went home to Alsace and had never a sign of

that dreadful disease.

Then all fears left Pasteur — it was very much like the case

of that first dog that Roux had injected years before, against

the master's wishes . So it was now with human beings ; once

little Meister came through unhurt, Pasteur shouted to the

world that he was prepared to guard the people of the world

from hydrophobia. This one case had completely chased his

fears, his doubts — those vivid but not very deep -lying doubts

of the artist that was in Louis Pasteur.

The tortured bitten people of the world began to pour into

the laboratory of the miracle -man of the Rue d'Ulm . Re

search for a moment came to an end in the messy small suite

of rooms, while Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland sorted out

polyglot crowds of mangled ones, babbling in a score of tongues :

“ Pasteur-save us ! ”

And this man who was no physician - who used to say with

proud irony : “ I am only a chemist," — this man of science who

all his life had wrangled bitterly with doctors, answered these

cries and saved them . He shot his complicated, illogical four

teen doses of partly weakened germs of rabies — unknown mi

crobes of rabies - into them and sent these people healthy back

to the four corners of the earth .

From Smolensk in Russia came nineteen peasants, moujiks

who had been set upon by a mad wolf nineteen days before,

and five of them were so terribly mangled they could not walk

at all, and had to be taken to the Hotel Dieu. Strange figures

in fur caps they came, saying: " Pasteur~ Pasteur," and this

was the only word of French they knew .

Then Paris went mad - as only Paris can — with excited con

cern about these bitten Russians who must surely die — it was

so long since they had been attacked — and the town talked of

nothing else while Pasteur and his men started their injections.

The chances of getting hydrophobia from the bites of mad

AND THE MAD DOG 181

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wolves are eight out of ten : out of these nineteen Russians,

fifteen were sure to die.

“ Maybe, " said every one, “ they will all die — it is more than

two weeks since they were attacked, poor fellows; the malady

must have a terrible start, they have no chance . ..." Such

was the gabble of the Boulevards.

Perhaps, indeed, it was too late. Pasteur could not eat nor

did he sleep at all. He took a terrible risk , and morning and

night, twice as quickly as he had ever made the fourteen in

jections — twice a day to make up for lost time he and his men

shot the vaccine into the arms of the Russians.

And at last a great shout of pride went up for this man Pas

teur, went up from the Parisians, and all of France and all the

world raised a pæan of thanks to him for the vaccine marvel

ously saved all but three of the doomed peasants. The moujiks

returned to Russia and were welcomed with the kind of awe

that greets the return of hopeless sick ones who have been

healed at some miraculous shrine . And the Tsar of All the

Russias sent Pasteur the diamond cross of Ste. Anne, and a

hundred thousand francs to start the building of that house of

microbe hunters in the Rue Dutot in Paris — that laboratory

now called the Institut Pasteur. From all over the world - it

was the kind of burst of generosity that only great disasters

usually call out - from every country in the earth came money,

piling up into millions of francs for the building of a labora

tory in which Pasteur might have everything needed to track

down other deadly microbes, to invent weapons against

them . .

The laboratory was built , but Pasteur's own work was done ;

his triumph was too much for him ; it was a kind of trigger,

perhaps, that snapped the strain of forty years of never before

heard -of ceaseless searching. He died in 1895 in a little houseа

near the kennels where they now kept his rabid dogs, at Ville

neuve l'Etang, just outside of Paris. His end was that of the

devout Catholic, the mystic he had always been. In one hand

he held a crucifix and in the other lay the hand of the most

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patient, obscure and important of his collaborators – Madame

Pasteur. Around him , too, were Roux and Chamberland and

those other searchers he had worn to tatters with his restless

energy , those faithful ones he had abused, whom he had above

all inspired ; and these men who had risked their lives in the

carrying out of his wild forays against death would now have

died to save him, if they could.

That was the perfect end of this so human, so passionately

imperfect hunter of microbes and saver of lives .

But there is another end of his career that I like to think of

more — and that was the day, in 1892 , of Pasteur's seventieth

birthday — when a medal was given to him at a great meeting

held to honor him , at the Sorbonne in Paris. Lister was there,

and many other famous men from other nations, and in tier

upon tier , above these magnificoes who sat in the seats of honor,

were the young men of France — the students of the Sorbonne

and the colleges and the high schools. There was a great buzz

of young voices — all at once a hush, as Pasteur limped up the

aisle, leaning on the arm of the President of the French Re

public. And then — it is the kind of business that is usually

pulled off to welcome generals and that kind of hero who has

directed the futile butchering of thousands of enemies — the

band of the Republican Guard blared out into a triumphal

march.

Lister, the prince of surgeons, rose from his seat and hugged

Pasteur and the gray-bearded important men and the boys in

the top galleries cried and shook the walls with the roar of

their cheering. At last the old microbe hunter gave his speech

-the voice of the fierce arguments was gone and his son had to

speak it for him - and his last words were a hymn of hope, not

so much for the saving of life as a kind of religious cry for a

new way of life for men. It was to the students, to the boys

of the high schools he was calling :

" ... Do not let yourselves be tainted by a deprecating and

barren skepticism , do not let yourselves be discouraged by the

sadness of certain hours which pass over nations. " Live in the

AND THE MAD DOG 183

serene peace of laboratories and libraries. Say to yourselves

first : What have I done for my instruction ? and, as you grad

ually advance, What have I done for my country ? until the

time comes when you may have the immense happiness of

thinking that you have contributed in some way to the prog

ress and good of humanity. "

.

CHAPTER VI

ROUX AND BEHRING

MASSACRE THE GUINEA - PIGS

I

.

It was to save babies that they killed so many guinea -pigs!

Émile Roux, the fanatical helper of Pasteur, in 1888 took

up the tools his master had laid down, and started on searches

of his own . In a little while he discovered a strange poison

seeping from the bacillus of diphtheria — one ounce of the pure

essence of this stuff was enough to kill seventy -five thousand

big dogs. A few years later, while Robert Koch was bending

under the abuse and curses of sad ones who had been disap

pointed by his supposed cure for consumption, Emil Behring,

the poetical pupil ofKoch, spied out a strange virtue, an un

known something in the blood of guinea - pigs. It could make

that powerful diphtheria poison completely harmless . ...

These two Emils revived men's hopes after Koch's disaster,

and once more people believed for a time that microbes were

going to be turned from assassins into harmless little pets .

What experiments these two young men made to discover

this diphtheria antitoxin ! They went at it frantic to save

lives ; they groped at it among bizarre butcherings of countless

guinea -pigs; in the evenings their laboratories were shambles

like the battlefields of old days when soldiers were mangled by

spears and pierced by arrows . Roux dug ghoulishly into the

spleens of dead children - Behring bumped his nose in the

darkness of his ignorance against facts the gods themselves

could not have predicted. For each brilliant experiment these

two had to pay with a thousand failures.

184

MASSACRE THE GUINEA -PIGS 185

But they discovered the diphtheria antitoxin.

They never could have done it without the modest discovery

of Frederick Loeffler. He was that microbe hunter whose mus

tache was so militaristic that he had to keep pulling it down to

see through his microscope ; he sat working at Koch's right

hand in that brave time when the little master was tracking

down the tubercle bacillus. It was in the early eighteen eigh

ties, and diphtheria , which several times each hundred years

seems to have violent ups and downs of viciousness — diph

theria was particularly murderous then. The wards of the hos

pitals for sick children were melancholy with a forlorn wailing ;

there were gurgling coughs foretelling suffocation ; on the sad

rows of narrow beds were white pillows framing small faces

blue with the strangling grip of an unknown hand. Through

these rooms walked doctors trying to conceal their hopelessness

with cheerfulness ; powerless they went from cot to cot - try

ing now and again to give a choking child its breath by pushing

a tube into its membrane -plugged windpipe.

Five out of ten of these cots sent their tenants to the

morgue.

Below in the dead house toiled Frederick Loeffler, boiling

knives , heating platinum wires red hot and with them lifting

grayish stuff from the still throats of those bodies the doctors

had failed to keep alive ; and this stuff he put into slim tubes

capped with white fluffs of cotton , or he painted it with dyes,

which showed him, through his microscope , that there were

queer bacilli shaped like Indian clubs in those throats, microbes

which the dye painted with pretty blue dots and stripes and

bars. In nearly every throat he discovered these strange ba

cilli; he hurried to show them to his master, Koch .

There is little doubt Koch led Loeffler by the hand in this

discovery . “ There is no use to jump at conclusions, ” you can

hear Koch telling him. “ You must grow these microbes pure

then you must inject the cultivations into animals. ... If

those beasts come down with a disease exactly like human

diphtheria , then ....." How could Loeffler have gone wrong ,

.

186 ROUX AND BEHRING

with that terribly pedantic, but careful, truth -hunting little czar

of microbe hunters squinting at him from behind those eternal

spectacles ?

One dead child after another Loeffler examined ; he poked

into every part of each pitiful body ; he stained a hundred dif

ferent slices of every organ ; he tried — and quickly succeeded

-in growing those queer barred bacilli pure . But everywhere

he searched, in every part of each body, he found no microbes

-except in the membrane - cluttered throat. And always here,

in every child but one or two, he came on those Indian club

shaped rods. “How can these few microbes, growing nowhere

in the body but the throat - how can these few germs, staying

in that one place, kill a child so quickly ? " pondered Loeffler ,

“ But I must follow Herr Koch's directions!” and he proceeded

to shoot the germs of his pure cultivations into the windpipes

of rabbits and beneath the skins of guinea-pigs. Quickly these

animals died - in two or three days, like a child , or even more

quickly — but the microbes, which Loeffler had shot into them

in millions, could only be found at the spot where he had in

jected them . . . . And sometimes there were none to be found

even here, or at best a few feeble ones hardly strong enough,

you would think , to hurt a flea . ..

“ But how is it these few bacilli - sticking in one little corner

of the body - how can they topple over a beast a million times

larger than they are themselves?” asked Loeffler.

Never was there a more conscientious searcher than this

Loeffler, nor one with less of a wild imagination to liven - or to

spoil — his almost automatic exactness. He sat himself down ;

he wrote a careful scientific paper; it was modest, it was cold ,

it was not hopeful, it was a most unlawyer -like report reciting

all of the fors and againsts on the question of whether or no

this new bacillus was the cause of diphtheria. He leaned over

backward to be honest - he put last the facts that were against

it ! " This microbe may be the cause,” you can hear himmum

bling as he wrote, “ but in a few children dead of diphtheria I

could not find these germs none of my inoculated animals

.

MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS 187

get paralysis as children do ... what is most against me is

that I've discovered this same microbe - it was vicious against

guinea -pigs and rabbits too !-in the throat of a child with

never a sign of diphtheria ."

He even went so far as to underestimate the importance of

his exact fine searching, but at the end of his treatise he gave

a clew to the more imaginative Roux and Behring who came

after him. A strange man , this Loeffler ! Without seeming to

be able to make a move to do it himself, he predicted what

others must find :

“This bacillus stays on a little patch of dead tissue in the

throat of a baby ; it lurks on a little point under a guinea -pig's

skin ; it never swarms in millions — yet it kills ! How ?

" It must make a poison — a toxin that leaks out of it, sneak

ing from it to some vital spot in the body. Such a toxin must

be found, in the organs of a dead child, in the carcass of a

guinea -pig dead of the disease - yes — and in the broth where

the bacillus grows so well. ... The man finding this poison

will prove what I have failed to demonstrate.” Such was the

dream Loeffler put into Roux's head. ...

II

Four years later Loeffler's words came true — by what seemed

an utterly silly, but what was surely a most fantastical experi

ment you would have thought could only result in drowning a

guinea -pig. What a hectic microbe hunting went on in Paris

just then ! Pasteur, in a state of collapse after his triumph

of the dog bite vaccine, was feebly superintending the building

of his million-franc Institute in the Rue Dutot. The wild,

half- charlatan Metchnikoff had come out of Odessa in Russia

to belch quaint theories about how phagocytes gobble up ma

lignant germs. Pasteurians were packing microscopes in

satchels and hurrying to Saigon in Indo -China and to Australia

to try to discover microbes of weird diseases that did not exist.

Hopefully frantic women were burying Pasteur - he was too

188 ROUX AND BEHR ING

tired !—under letters begging him to save their children from

a dozen horrid diseases .

" If you will, ” one woman wrote him, " you can surely find a

remedy for the horrible disease called diphtheria . Our chil

dren, to whom we teach your name as a great benefactor, will

owe their lives to you !”

Pasteur was absolutely done up, but Roux - and he was

helped by the intrepid Yersin who afterward brilliantly discov

ered the germ of the black death - set out to try to find a way

to wipe diphtheria from the earth . It wasn't a science — it was

a crusade, this business. It was full of passion , of purpose ; it

lacked skillful lying-in-wait, and those long planned artistic

ambushes you find in most discoveries. I will not say Émile

Roux began his searching because of this pitiful note from that

woman - but there is no doubt he worked to save rather than

to know. From the old palsied master down to the most ob

scure bottle wiper, the men of this house in the Rue Dutot were

humanitarians; they were saviors — and that is noble !—but

this drove them sometimes into strange byways far off the

road where you find truth. ... And in spite of this Roux

made a marvelous discovery .

Roux and Yersin went to the Hospital for Sick Children

diphtheria was playing hell with Paris — and here they ran on

to the same bacillus Loeffler had found. They grew this mi

crobe in flasks of broth , and did the regular accepted thing

first, shooting great quantities of this soup into an assorted

menagerie of unfortunate birds and quadrupeds who had to die

without the satisfaction of knowing they were martyrs. It

wasn't particularly enlightened searching , this, but almost from

the tap of the gong, they stumbled on one of the proofs Loef

fler had failed to find. Their diphtheria soup paralyzed rab

bits ! The stuff went into their veins ; in a few days the de

lighted experimenters watched these beasts drag their hind

legs limply after them ; the palsy crept up their bodies to their

front legs and shoulders — they died in a clammy, dreadful

paralysis. . . .

MASSACRE THE GUINEA -PIGS 189

a

" It hits rabbits just the way it does children ," muttered

Roux, full of a will to believe “ This bacillus must be the

true cause of diphtheria. ... I shall find the germ in these

rabbits' bodies now ! ” And he clawed tissues out of a dozen

corners of their carcasses ; he made cultivations of their spleens

and hearts — but never a bacillus ! Only a few days before he

had pumped a billion or so into them, each of them . Here they

were, drawn and quartered, carved up and searched from their

pink noses to the white under-side of their tails. And not a

bacillus. What had killed them then ?

Then Loeffler's prediction flashed over Roux: " It must be

the germs make a poison , in this broth, to paralyze and kill

these beasts ...” he pondered .

For a while the searcher came uppermost in him. He for

got about possible savings of babies; he concentrated on vast

butcheries of guinea -pigs and rabbits — he must prove that the

diphtheria germ drips a toxin out of its wee body. ... To.

gether with Yersin he began a good unscientific fumbling at

experiments ; they were in the dark ; there were no precedents

nor any kind of knowledge to go by. No microbe hunterbe

fore them had ever separated a deadly poison ( though Pasteur

had once made something of a try at it ) fromthebodies of

microbes. They were alone in the dark , Roux and Yersin

but they lighted matches. ..... " The bacilli must pour out a

poison into the broth we grow them in just as they pour it

from their membrane in a child's throat into his blood !” Of

course that last was not proved.

Then Roux stopped arguing in a circle. He searched. He

worked with his hands. It was worse, this fumbling of his,

than trying to get a stalled motor to go when you know noth

ing about internal combustion machinery . He took big glass

bottles and put pure microbeless soup into them , and sowed

pure cultivations of the diphtheria bacillus in this broth ; into

the incubating oven went the large-bellied bottles— "Now

we will try separating the germs from the soup in which they

grow , ” said Roux, after the bottle had ripened for four days.

190 ROUX AND BEHRI NG

.

They rigged up a strange apparatus — it was a filter, shaped like

a candle, only it was hollow, and made of fine porcelain that

would let the soup through, but so tight-meshed that it would

hold the tiniest bacilli back . With tongue -protruding care to

keep themselves from being splashed with this deadly stuff,

they poured the microbe -teeming broth around the candles

held rigid in shiny glass cylinders. They fussed - maybe, or

at least I hope so, with the blessed relief of profanity - but

the broth wouldn't run through the porcelain. But at last they

pushed it through with high air pressure — and finally they

breathed easy, arranging little flasks full of a clear , amber

colored filtered fluid (it had never a germ in it) on their lab

oratory bench.

“ This stuff should have the poison in it ... the filter has

held back all the microbes - but this stuff should kill our ani

mals,” muttered Roux. The laboratory buzzed with eager

animal-boys getting ready the rabbits and guinea- pigs. Into

the bellies of these beasts went the golden juice propelled from

the syringe by Roux's deft hands. .

He became a murderer in his heart, this Émile Roux, and in

his head as he came down to the laboratory each morning

were half -mad wishes for the death of his beasts. “ The stuff

should be hitting them by now , " you can hear him growling

to Yersin, but they looked in vain for the ruffled hair, the

dragging hind legs, the cold shivering bodies to tell them their

wish was coming true.

It was beastly! All of this fussing with the delicate filter

experiments — and the animals munched at the greens in their

cages, they hopped about, males sniffed at females and en

gaged in those absurd scufflings with other males which guinea

pigs and rabbits hold to be necessary to the propagation of

their kind . . . . Let these giants (who fed them well ) inject

more of this stuff into their veins, their bellies — poison ?

Imagination! It made them feel happy .

Roux tried again. He shot bigger doses of his filtered soup

into the animals, other animals, still more animals. It was no

go , there was no poison.

.

MASSACRE THE GUINEA-PIGS 191

That is , for a merely sensible man there would have been

no poison in the filtered soup that had stood in the incubator

for four days. Hadn't enough animals been wasted trying

it ? But Roux (let all mothers and children and the gods car

ing for insane searchers bless himl ) was no reasonable man

just then . For a moment he had caught Pasteur's madness,

his strange trick of knowing what all men thought wrong to be

right, his flair for good impossible experiments. “There is a

poison there!” you can hear that hawk -faced consumptive

Roux shout to himself, to the dusty, bottle-loaded shelves of

his laboratory, to the guinea -pigs who would have snickered

if they could have at his earnest futile efforts to murder

them . “There must be a poison in this soup where the diph

theria germs have grown - else why should those rabbits have

died ?"

Then I have told scientific searchers about this and they

have held their noses at such an experiment - Roux nearly

drowned a guinea -pig. For weeks he had been injecting more

and more of his filtered soup, but now ( it was like facing a

night on a park bench with your last dime on the two dice ) he

injected thirty times as much ! Not even Pasteur would have

risked such an outlandish dose - thirty -five cubic centimeters

Roux shot under the guinea -pig's skin and you would expect

that much water would kill such a little beast. If he died it

would mean nothing. . . . But into the belly of a guinea -pig.. a

and into the ear -vein of a rabbit went this ocean of filtered

juice — it was as if he had put a bucketful of it into the veins

of a middle - sized man .

But that was the way Roux carved his name on those tab

lets which men while they are on earth must never allow to

crumble; for, though the rabbit and the guinea -pig stood the

mere bulk of the microbe - less broth very well, and appeared

perfectly chipper for a day or so afterwards, in forty -eight

hours their hair was on end, their breath began to come in

little hiccups . In five days they were dead, with exactly those

symptoms their brothers had, after injections ef the living

192 ROUX AND BEHRING

a

diphtheria bacilli. So it was that Emile Roux discovered the

diphtheria poison.

By itself this weird experiment of the gigantic dose of

feebly poisonous soup would only have made microbe hunters

laugh. It was scandalous. “What ! -if a great flask of diph

theria microbes can make so little poison that it takes a good

part of a bottle of it to kill a small guinea -pig - how can a few

microbes in a child's throat make enough to do that child to

death ? It is idiotic ! ”

But Roux had got his start. With this silly experiment as

an uncertain flashlight, he went tripping and stumbling through

the thickets, he bent his sallow bearded face (sometimes it was

like the face of some unearthly bird of prey ) over a precise