ved ideas, although I must
confess that among my friends I found no one of the same opinion.

We know how Pasteur won a striking victory through his patience and his
genius. He demonstrated that millions and millions of germs are present
in the air about us and that when one of them finds favorable
conditions, a living being appears which engenders others. "Many are
called, but few are chosen." This law may seem unjust, but it is one of
the great laws of Nature.

Pasteur, the great benefactor, whose discoveries did so much for all
classes of society, should have been popular, but he was, on the
contrary, extremely unpopular. The leading publicists of the day were
influenced by some inexplicable sentiment and they made constant war on
him. When, after several years of prodigious labor, Pasteur ventured to
assert himself, they took advantage of his following the dictates of
humanity in accepting all sorts of cases, curable or not, to spread a
report that his treatment did not cure, but instead gave the disease
which it was supposed to cure. Popular fury was aroused to such a
height, that a monster mass meeting was held _against_ Pasteur. Louise
Michel addressed this meeting with her customary vigor of speech and
amidst frantic applause shouted this unqualified remark, "_Scientific
questions should be settled by the people._"

By this time everybody was talking about microbes, and a shop on the
boulevards announced an exhibition of them. They used what is known as a
solar microscope and threw on a screen, suitably enlarged, the
animalculae which grow in impure water, the larvae of mosquitoes, and
other insects, which bear about the same relation to microbes that an
elephant does to a flea. I went into this establishment, and saw the
plain people with their wives looking at the exhibition very seriously
and really believing that they saw the famous microbes. One of them near
me said, with a knowing air, "What won't science do next?"

I was indignant, and I had all I could do to keep from saying: "They are
fooling you. What they are showing you is not Science, at the most only
its antechamber. As for you who are deceiving these naive good people,
you are only impostors."

But I kept still; I would only have succeeded in getting thrown out. But
I said to myself--and I still say--"Why not enlighten these people, who
obviously want light?" It is impossible to _teach_ them science, but it
should be possible to make them at