Microbe Hunters

1. Microbe Hunters

Microbe Hunters

Kruif, Paul De

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MICROBE HUNTERS

THIS IS A WARTIME BOOK

THIS EDITION WHICH IS COMPLETEAND UNABRIDGED IS PRODUCED IN FULLCOMPLIANCE WTTII THE GOVERNMENT’SREGULATIONS FOR CONSERVING PAPER

AND OTHER ESSENTIAL MATERIALS,

MICROBE HUNTERS

. . it is one of the most interesting stories ever told. To saythat there is not a dull line in the book is to say what is true,and one may say further what is equally true, that one reads onand on and on—absorbed, fascinated and proud to belong tothe same family of primates which produced a Pasteur, andto the same nation which produced a Walter Reed.”

—New Yor^ Herald Tribune

“This book will hold you spellbound to the end. It is as fine abit of biographical narrative as has appeared in this country.”

-Los Angeles Times

“. . . he writes . . . with admiration of men and deeds thatconstitute a chapter of scientific history thrilling and romanticas any conquest or voyage or discovery.”

-Saturday Review of Literature

“A wonderful book. It is a hunting story as interesting as anystory of African game hunters, or tiger hunters in Asia. . . .This is a book for those who love high adventure, who delightin clear, brave writing, and stirring narrative.”

-Emporia Gazette

“It is all written like some adventure story, full of thrills andminus technicalities. It is of absorbing interest and full of in-formation. Biography, science, and heroism are mingled inabout equal proportions and they make a good mixture.”

-Boston Transcript

“What Monsieur Maurois has done for Shelley in his Ariel, whatMiss Barrington has done for Byron in her Glorious Apollo,what Mr. Strachey has done for Victoria, he has done for adozen bacteriologists ... he has made them live again, andgiven the reader an unforgettable familiarity with them.”

-Science News Letter

“Paul de Kruif writes lyrically of microbes and microscopes; hesings the epic of diphtheria, malaria, hydrophobia and yellowfever . . . De Kruif has been able to catch much of the ro-mance of medicine and to make it live in his pages.”

—iChicago Daily News

7*//* cjj

entente

I LEEUWENHOEK: First of the Microbe Hunters i

II SPALLANZANI: Microbes Must Have Parents7 25

III PASTEUR: Microbes Are a Menace! 60

IV KOCH: The Death Fighter 115

V PASTEUR: And the Mad Dog 160

VI ROUX AND BEHRING: Massacre the Guinea-Pigs 202

VII METCHNIKOFF: The Nice Phagocytes 228

VIII THEOBALD SMITH: Ticks and Texas Fever 258

IX BRUCE: Trail of the Tsetse 277

X ROSS VS. GRASSI: Malaria 305

XI WALTER REED: In the Interest of Science — and

for HumanityI 340

XII PAUL EHRLICH: The Magic Bullet 366

INDEX 395

CHAPTER I

LEEUWENHOEKFirst of the Microbe Hunters

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Two hundred and fifty years ago an obscure man namedLeeuwenhoek looked for the first time into a mysteriousnew world peopled with a thousand different kinds oftiny beings, some ferocious and deadly, others friendly anduseful, many of them more important to mankind thanany continent or archipelago.

Leeuwenhoek, unsung and scarce remembered, is nowalmost as unknown as his strange little animals and plantswere at the time he discovered them. This is the story ofLeeuwenhoek, the first of the microbe hunters. It is thetale of the bold and persistent and curious explorers andfighters of death who came after him. It is the plain his-tory of their tireless peerings into this new fantasticworld. They have tried to chart it, these microbe huntersand death fighters. So trying they have groped and fum-bled and made mistakes and roused vain hopes. Some ofthem who were too bold have died—done to death by theimmensely small assassins they were studying—and thesehave passed to an obscure small glory.

To-day it is respectable to be a man of science. Thosewho go by the name of scientist form an important ele-ment of the population, their laboratories are in everycity, their achievements are on the front pages of the

newspapers, often before they are fully achieved. Almostany young university student can go in for research andby and by become a comfortable science professor at a tidylittle salary in a cozy college. But take yourself back toLeeuwenhoek’s day, two hundred and fifty years ago, andimagine yourself just through high school, getting readyto 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 hetells you a mumpish evil spirit has got into you. His the-ory may not impress you much, but you decide to makebelieve you believe him and not to wonder any moreabout what is mumps—because if you publicly don’t be-lieve him you are in for a beating and may even beturned out of the house. Your father is Authority.

That was the world about three hundred years ago, whenLeeuwenhoek was born. It had hardly begun to shake it-self free from superstitions, it was barely beginning toblush for its ignorance. It was a world where science(which only means trying to find truth by careful observa-tion and clear thinking) was just learning to toddle onvague and wobbly legs. It was a world where Servetuswas burned to death for daring to cut up and examinethe body of a dead man, where Galileo was shut up forlife for daring to prove that the earth moved around thesun.

Antony Leeuwenhoek was born in 1632 amid the bluewindmills and low streets and high canals of Delft, inHolland. His family were burghers of an intensely respec-table kind and I say intensely respectable because theywere basket-makers and brewers, and brewers are respec-table and highly honored in Holland. Leeuwenhoek’sfather died early and his mother sent him to school tolearn to be a government official, but he left school at six-

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teen to be an apprentice in a dry-goods store in Amster-dam. That was his university. Think of a present-dayscientist getting his training for experiment among boltsof gingham, listening to the tinkle of the bell on the cashdrawer, being polite to an eternal succession of Dutchhousewives who shopped with a penny-pinching dreadfulexhaustiveness—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 ofhis own there. For twenty years after that very little isknown about him, except that he had two wives (in suc-cession) and several children most of whom died, butthere is no doubt that during this time he was appointedjanitor of the city hall of Delft, and that he developed amost idiotic love for grinding lenses. He had heard thatif you very carefully ground very little lenses out of clearglass, you would see things look much bigger than theyappeared to the naked eye. . . . Little is known abouthim from twenty to forty, but there is no doubt that hepassed in those days for an ignorant man. The only lan-guage he knew was Dutch—that was an obscure languagedespised by the cultured world as a tongue of fishermenand shop-keepers and diggers of ditches. Educated mentalked Latin in those days, but Leeuwenhoek could not somuch as read it and his only literature was the DutchBible. Just the same, you will see that his ignorance wasa great help to him, for, cut off from all of the learnednonsense of his time, he had to trust to his own eyes, hisown thoughts, his own judgment. And that was easy forhim because there never was a more mulish man thanthis Antony Leeuwenhoek!

It would be great fun to look through a lens and seethings bigger than your naked eye showed them to you I

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But buy lenses? Not Leeuwenhoek! There never was amore suspicious man. Buy lenses? He would make themhimself! During these twenty years of his obscurity hewent to spectacle-makers and got the rudiments of lens-grinding. He visited alchemists and apothecaries and puthis nose into their secret ways of getting metals from ores,he began fumblingly to learn the craft of the gold- andsilversmiths. He was a most pernickety man and was notsatisfied with grinding lenses as good as those of the bestlens-grinder in Holland, they had to be better than thebest, and then he still fussed over them for long hours.Next he mounted these lenses in little oblongs of copperor silver or gold, which he had extracted himself, overhot fires, among strange smells and fumes. To-day search-ers pay seventy-five dollars for a fine shining microscope,turn the screws, peer through it, make discoveries—with-out knowing anything about how it is built. But Leeu-wenhoek—

Of course his neighbors thought he was a bit crackedbut Leeuwenhoek went on burning and blistering hishands. Working forgetful of his family and regardless ofhis friends, he bent solitary to subtle tasks in still nights.The good neighbors sniggered, while that man found away to make a tiny lens, less than one-eighth of an inchacross, so symmetrical, so perfect, that it showed littlethings to him with a fantastic clear enormousness. Yes, hewas a very uncultured man, but he alone of all men inHolland knew how to make those lenses, and he said ofthose neighbors: “We must forgive them, seeing that theyknow no better.”

Now this self-satisfied dry-goods dealer began to turnhis lenses onto everything he could get hold of. Helooked through them at the muscle fibers of a whale andthe scales of his own skin. He went to the butcher shop

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and begged or bought ox-eyes and was amazed at howprettily the crystalline lens of the eye of the ox is put to-gether. He peered for hours at the build of the hairs of asheep, of a beaver, of an elk, that were transformed fromtheir fineness into great rough logs under his bit of glass.He delicately dissected the head of a fly; he stuck itsbrain on the fine needle of his microscope—how he ad-mired the clear details of the marvelous big brain of thatfly! He examined the cross-sections of the wood of adozen different trees and squinted at the seeds of plants.He grunted “Impossible!” when he first spied the outland-ish large perfection of the sting of a flea and the legs of alouse. That man Leeuwenhoek was like a puppy whosniffs—with a totally impolite disregard of discrimination—at every object of the world around him!

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There never was a less sure man than Leeuwenhoek. Helooked at this bee’s sting or that louse’s leg again andagain and again. He left his specimens sticking on thepoint of his strange microscope for months—in order tolook at other things he made more microscopes till hehad hundreds of them!—then he came back to those firstspecimens to correct his first mistakes. He never set downa word about anything he peeped at, he never made adrawing until hundreds of peeps showed him that, undergiven conditions, he would always see exactly the samething. And then he was not sure! He said:

“People who look for the first time through a micro-scope say now I see this and then I see that—and even askilled observer can be fooled. On these observations Ihave spent more time than many will believe, but I havedone them with joy, and I have taken no notice of thosewho have said why take so much trouble and what good

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is it?—but I do not write for such people but only for thephilosophical!” He worked for twenty years that way,without an audience.

But at this time, in the middle of the seventeenth cen-tury, great things were astir in the world. Here and therein France and England and Italy rare men were thumb-ing their noses at almost everything that passed for knowl-edge. “We will no longer take Aristotle’s say-so, nor thePope’s say-so,” said these rebels. “We will trust only theperpetually repeated observations of our own eyes and thecareful weighings of our scales; we will listen to theanswers experiments give us and no other answers!”So in England a few of these revolutionists started a soci-ety called The Invisible College, it had to be invisible be-cause that man Cromwell might have hung them forplotters and heretics if he had heard of the strange ques-tions they were trying to settle. What experiments thosesolemn searchers made! Put a spider in a circle made ofthe powder of a unicorn’s horn and that spider can’tcrawl out—so said the wisdom of that day. But these In-visible Collegians? One of them brought what was sup-posed to be powdered unicorn’s horn and another camecarrying a little spider in a bottle. The college crowdedaround under the light of high candles. Silence, then thehushed experiment, and here is their report of it:

“A circle was made with the powder of unicorn’s hornand a spider set in the middle of it, but immediatelyran out.”

Crude, you exclaim. Of course! But remember that oneof the members of this college was Robert Boyle, founderof the science of chemistry, and another was Isaac New-ton. Such was the Invisible College, and presently, whenCharles II came to the throne, it rose from its depths as asort of blind-pig scientific society to the dignity of the

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name of the Royal Society of England. And they wereAntony Leeuwenhoek’s first audience! There was oneman in Delft who did not laugh at Antony Leeuwen-hoek, and that was Regnier de Graaf, whom the Lordsand Gcndemen of the Royal Society had made a corre-sponding member because he had written them of inter*esting things he had found in the human ovary. AlreadyLeeuwenhoek 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 orEngland or the whole world for that matter. What deGraaf saw through those microscopes made him ashamedof his own fame and he hurried to write to the RoyalSociety:

“Get Antony Leeuwenhoek to write you telling of hisdiscoveries.”

And Leeuwenhoek answered the request of the RoyalSociety with all the confidence of an ignorant man whofails to realize the profound wisdom of the philosophershe addresses. It was a long letter, it rambled over everysubject under the sun, it was written with a comical art-lessness in the conversational Dutch that was the onlylanguage he knew. The title of that letter was: “A Speci-men of some Observations made by a Microscope con-trived by Mr. Leeuwenhoek, concerning Mould upon theSkin, Flesh, etc.; the Sting of a Bee, etc.” The Royal So-ciety was amazed, the sophisticated and learned gentle-men were amused—but principally the Royal Society wasastounded by the marvelous things Leeuwenhoek toldthem he could see through his new lenses. The Secretaryof the Royal Society thanked Leeuwenhoek and told himhe hoped his first communication would be followed byothers. It was, by hundreds of others over a period offifty years. They were talkative letters full of salty re

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marks about his ignorant neighbors, of exposures of char-latans and of skilled explodings of superstitions, of chatterabout his personal health—but sandwiched between para-graphs and pages of this homely stuff, in almost every let-ter, those Lords and Gentlemen of the Royal Society hadthe honor of reading immortal and gloriously accuratedescriptions of the discoveries made by the magic eye ofthat janitor and shopkeeper. What discoveries!

When you look back at them, many of the fundamen-tal discoveries of science seem so simple, too absurdly sim-ple. How was it men groped and fumbled for so manythousands of years without seeing things that lay rightunder their noses? So with microbes. Now all the worldhas seen them cavorting on movie screens, many people oflittle learning have peeped at them swimming about un-der lenses of microscopes, the greenest medical student isable to show you the germs of I don’t'know how manydiseases—what was so hard about seeing microbes for thefirst time?

But let us drop our sneers to remember that whenLeeuwenhoek was born there were no microscopes butonly crude hand-lenses that would hardly make a ten-centpiece look as large as a quarter. Through these—withouthis incessant grinding of his own marvelous lenses—thatDutchman might have looked till he grew old withoutdiscovering any creature smaller than a cheese-mite. Youhave read that he made better and better lenses with thefanatical persistence of a lunatic; that he examined every-thing, the most intimate things and the most shockingthings, with the silly curiosity of a puppy. Yes, and allthis squinting at bee-stings and mustache hairs and what-not were needful to prepare him for that sudden daywhen he looked through his toy of a gold-mounted lens

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at a fraction of a small drop of clear rain water to dis-cover—

What he saw that day starts this history. Leeuwenhoekwas a maniac observer, and who but such a strange manwould have thought to turn his lens on clear, pure water,just come down from the sky? What could there be inwater but just—water? You can imagine his daughterMaria—she was nineteen and she took such care of herslightly insane father!—watching him take a little tube ofglass, heat it red-hot in a flame, draw it out to the thin-ness of a hair. . . . Maria was devoted to her father—letany 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-eyedman break the tube into little pieces, go out into the gar-den to bend over an earthen pot kept there to measurethe fall of the rain. He bends over that pot. He goesback into his study. He sticks the little glass pipe ontothe needle of his microscope. . . .

What can that dear silly father be up to?

He squints through his lens. He mutters guttural wordsunder his breath. . . .

Then suddenly the excited voice of Leeuwenhoek:“Come here! Hurry! There are little animals in this rainwater. . . . They swim! They play around! They are athousand times smaller than any creatures we can setwith our eyes alone. . . . Look! See what I have discov-ered!”

Leewenhoek’s day of days had come. Alexander hadgone to India and discovered huge elephants that noGreek had ever seen before—but those elephants were ascommonplace to Hindus as horses were to Alexander.

Carsar had gone to England and come upon savages thatopened his eyes with wonder—but these Britons were asordinary to each other as Roman centurions were to Cae-sar. Balboa? What were his proud feelings as he lookedfor the first time at the Pacific? Just the same that Oceanwas as ordinary to a Central American Indian as theMediterranean was to Balboa. But Leeuwenhoek? Thisjanitor of Delft had stolen upon and peeped into a fantas-tic sub-visible world of little things, creatures that hadlived, had bred, had battled, had died, completely hiddenfrom and unknown to all men from the beginning oftime. Beasts these were of a kind that ravaged and anni-hilated whole races of men ten million times larger thanthey were themselves. Beings these were, more terriblethan fire-spitting dragons or hydra-headed monsters. Theywere silent assassins that murdered babes in warm cradlesand kings in sheltered places. It was this invisible, insigni-ficant, but implacable—and sometimes friendly—worldthat Leeuwenhoek had looked into for the first time ofall men of all countries.

This was Leeuwenhoek’s day of days. . . .

in

That man was so unashamed of his admirations and hissurprises at a nature full of startling events and impossiblethings. How I wish I could take myself back, couldbring you back, to that innocent time when men werejust beginning to disbelieve in miracles and only startingto find still more miraculous facts. How marvelous itwould be to step into that simple Dutchman’s shoes, to beinside his brain and body, to feel his excitement—it is al-most. nausea!—at his first peep at those cavorting'‘wretched beasties.”

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

TO

this Leeuwenhoek was an unsure man. Those animalswere too tremendously small to be true, they were toostrange to be true. So he looked again, till his handswere cramped with holding his microscope and his eyesfull of that smarting water that comes from too-longlooking. But he was right! Here they were again, notone kind of little creature, but here was another, largerthan the first, “moving about very nimbly because theywere furnished with divers incredibly thin feet.” Wait!Here is a third kind—and a fourth, so tiny I can’t makeout his shape. But he is alive! He goes about, dashingover great distances in this world of his water-drop in thelittle tube. . . . What nimble creatures!

“They stop, they stand still as ’twere upon a point, andthen turn themselves round with that swiftness, as we seea top turn round, the circumference they make being nobigger than that of a fine grain of sand.” So wrote Leeu-wenhoek.

For all this seemingly impractical sniffing about, Leeu-wenhoek was a hard-headed man. He hardly ever spuntheories, he was a fiend for measuring things. Only howcould you make a measuring stick for anything so smallas these little beasts? He wrinkled his low forehead:“How large really is this last and smallest of the littlebeasts?” He poked about in the cobwebbed corners of hismemory among the thousand other things he had studiedwith you can’t imagine what thoroughness; he made cal-culations: “This last kind of animal is a thousand timessmaller than the eye of a large louse!” That was an accu-rate man. For we know now that the eye of one full-grown louse is no larger nor smaller than the eyes of tenthousand of his brother and sister lice.

But where did these outlandish little inhabitants of therainwater come from? Had they come down from the

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sky? Had they crawled invisibly over the side of the potfrom the ground? Or had they been created out of noth-ing by a God full of whims? Leeuwenhoek believed inGod as piously as any Seventeenth Century Dutchman.He always referred to God as the Maker of the Great All.He not only believed in God but he admired him in-tensely—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 liv-ing things in six days, and, having set the machinery go-ing, sat back to reward good observers and punish guess-ers and bluffers. He stopped speculating about improbablegentle rains of little animals from heaven. Certainly Godcouldn’t brew those animals in the rain water pot out ofnothing! But wait . . . Maybe? Well, there was onlyone way to find out where they came from. “I will ex-periment!” he muttered.

He washed out a wine glass very clean, he dried it, heheld it under the spout of his eaves-trough, he took a weedrop in one of his hair-fine tubes. Under his lens it went.. . , Yes! They were there, a few of those beasts, swim-ming about. • . . “They are present even in very freshrain water!” But then, that really proved nothing, theymight live in the eaves-trough and be washed down bythe water. . . .

Then he took a big porcelain dish, “glazed blue with-in,” he washed it clean, out into the rain he went with itand put it on top of a big box so that the falling rain-drops would splash no mud into the dish. The first waterhe threw out to clean it still more thoroughly. Then in-tently he collected the next bit in one of his slender pipes,into his study he went with it. . . .

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“I have proved it! This water has not a single littlecreature in it! They do not come down from the sky!"

But he kept that water; hour after hour, day after dayhe squinted at it—and on the fourth day he saw thosewee beasts beginning to appear in the water along withbits of dust and little flecks of thread and lint. That wasa man from Missouri! Imagine a world of men whowould submit all of their cocksure judgments to the or-deal of the common-sense experiments of a Leeuwenhoek!

Did he write to the Royal Society to tell them of thisentirely unsuspected world of life he had discovered ?Not yet! He was a slow man. He turned his lens ontoall kinds of water, water kept in the close air of his study,water in a pot kept on the high roof of his house, waterfrom the not-too-clean canals of Delft and water from thedeep cold well in his garden. Everywhere he found thosebeasts. He gaped at their enormous littleness, he foundmany thousands of them did not equal a grain of sand inbigness, he compared them to a cheese-mite and they wereto this filthy little creature as a bee is to a horse. He wasnever tired with watching them “swim about among oneanother gently like a swarm of mosquitoes in the air. . .

Of course this man was a groper. He was a groper anda 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 notenough for him, he was always poking into everything,trying to see more closely, trying to find reasons. Why isthe sharp taste of pepper? That was what he asked him-self one day, and he guessed: “There must be littlepoints on the particles of pepper and these points jab thetongue when you eat pepper. . .

But are there such little points?

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

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he couldn’t get the grains of pepper small enough to putunder his lens. So, to soften it, he put it to soak for sev-eral weeks in water. Then with fine needles he pried thealmost invisible specks of the pepper apart, and suckedthem up in a little drop of water into one of his hair-fineglass tubes. He looked—

Here was something to make even this determined manscatter-brained. He forgot about possible small sharp pointson the pepper. With the interest of an intent little boy hewatched the antics of “an incredible number of little ani-mals, of various sorts, which move very prettily, whichtumble about and sidewise, this way and that!”

So it was Leeuwenhoek stumbled on a magnificent wayto grow his new little animals.

And now to write all this to the great men off there inLondon! Artlessly he described his own astonishment tothem. Long page after page in a superbly neat handwrit-ing with little common words he told them that youcould put a million of these little animals into a coarsegrain of sand and that one drop of his pepper-water,where they grew and multiplied so well, held more thantwo-million seven-hundred-thousand of them. . . .

This letter was translated into English. It was read be-fore the learned skeptics—who no longer believed in themagic virtues of unicorn’s horns—and it bowled thelearned body over! What! The Dutchman said he haddiscovered beasts so small that you could put as many ofthem into one little drop of water as there were people inhis native country? Nonsense! The cheese mite was abso-lutely and without doubt the smallest creature God hadcreated.

But a few of the members did not scoff. This Leeu-wenhoek was a confoundedly accurate man: everythinghe had ever written to them they had found to be true.

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... So a letter went back to the scientific janitor, begginghim to write them in detail the way he had made hismiscroscope, and his method of observing.

That upset Leeuwenhoek. It didn’t matter that thesestupid oafs of Delft laughed at him—but the Royal Soci-ety? He had thought they were philosophers! Should hrwrite them details, or should he from now on keep every-thing he did to himself? “Great God,” you can imaginehim muttering, “these ways I have of uncovering mysteriousthings, how I have worked and sweat to learn to dothem, what jeering from how many fools haven’t I en-dured to perfect my microscopes and my ways of look-ing!...”

But creators must have audiences. He knew that thesedoubters of the Royal Society should have sweat just ashard to disprove the existence of his little animals as hehimself had toiled to discover them. He was hurt, but—creators must have an audience. So he replied to them ina long letter assuring them he never told anything toobig. He explained his calculations (and modern microbehunters with all of their apparatus make only slightlymore accurate ones!) he wrote these calculations out, divi-sions, multiplications, additions, until his letter looked likea child’s exercise in arithmetic. He finished by saying thatmany people of Delft had seen—with applause!—thesestrange new animals under his lens. He would send themaffidavits from prominent citizens of Delft—two men ofGod, one notary public, and eight other persons worthyto be believed. But he wouldn’t tell them how he madehis microscopes.

That was a suspicious man! He held his little machinesup for people to look through, but let them so much astouch the microscope to help themselves to see better andhe mijfthtffttel* tfifttti oOf of1 hW*houfe^ff . He was like

a child anxious and proud to show a large red apple to hisplaymates but loth to let them touch it for fear they mighttake a bite out of it.

So the Royal Society commissioned Robert Hooke andNehemiah Grew to build the very best microscopes, andbrew pepper water from the finest quality of black pepper.And, on the 15th of November, 1677, Hooke came carry-ing his microscope to the meeting—agog—for Antony Leeu-wenhoek had not lied. Here they were, those enchantedbeasts! The members rose from their seats and crowdedround the microscope. They peered, they exclaimed: thisman must be a wizard observer! That was a proud dayfor Leeuwenhoek. And a little later the Royal Societymade him a Fellow, sending him a gorgeous diploma ofmembership in a silver case with the coat of arms of thesociety on the cover. “I will serve you faithfully duringthe rest of my life,” he wrote them. And he was as goodas his word, for he mailed them those conversational mix-tures 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 sofar as to dispatch Doctor Molyneux to make a report onthis janitor-discoverer of the invisible. Molyneux offeredLeeuwenhoek a fine price for one of his microscopes—surely he could spare one?—for there were hundreds ofthem in cabinets that lined his study. But no! Was thereanything the gentleman of the Royal Society would like tosee? Here were some most curious little unborn oysters ina bottle, here were divers very nimble little animals, andthat Dutchman held up his lenses for the Englishman topeep through, watching all the while out of the corner ofhis eyes to see that the undoubtedly most honest visitordidn’t touch anything—or filch anything. . . .

'But your instruments are marvelous!” cried Molyneux.

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“A thousand times more clear they show things than anylens we have in England!”

“How I wish, Sir,” said Leeuwenhoek, “that I couldshow you my best lens, with my special way of observ-ing, but I keep that only for myself and do not show it toany one—not even to my own family.”

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Those little animals were everywhere! He told theRoyal Society of finding swarms of those sub-visible beingsin his mouth—of all places: “Although I am now fiftyyears old,” he wrote, “I have uncommonly well-preservedteeth, because it is my custom every morning to rub myteeth very hard with salt, and after cleaning my largeteeth with a quill, to rub them vigorously with a cloth.. . But there still were little bits of white stuff betweenhis teeth, when he looked at them with a magnifying mir-ror. . . .

What was this white stuff made of?

From his teeth he scraped a bit of this stuff, mixed itwith pure rain water, stuck it in a little tube on to theneedle of his microscope, closed the door of his study—

What was this that rose from the gray dimness of hislens into clear distinctness as he brought the tube into thefocus? Here was an unbelievably tiny creature, leapingabout 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 inpretty somersaults. There were some beings that movedsluggishly and looked like wee bent sticks, nothing more,but that Dutchman squinted at them till his eyes werered-rimmed—and they moved, they were alive, no doubtof it! There was a menagerie in his mouth! There werecreatures shaped like flexible rods that went to and fro

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with the stately carriage of bishops in procession, therewere spirals that whirled through the water like violentlyanimated corkscrews. . . .

Everybody he could get hold of—as well as himself—was an experimental animal for that curious man. Tiredfrom his long peering at the little beasts in his ownmouth, he went for a walk under the tall trees thatdropped their yellow leaves on the brown mirrors of thecanals; it was hard work, this play of his, he must rest!But he met an old man, a most interesting old man: “Iwas talking to this old man,” wrote Leeuwenhoek to theRoyal Society, “an old man who led a very sober life, whonever used brandy nor tobacco and very seldom wine, andmy eye chanced to fall on his teeth which were badlygrown over and that made me ask him when he had lastcleaned his mouth. I got for answer that he had nevercleaned his teeth in his whole life. . .

Away went all thought of his aching eyes. What a zooof wee animals must be in this old fellow’s mouth. Hedragged the dirty but virtuous victim of his curiosity intohis study—of course there were millions of wee beasties inthat mouth, but what he wanted particularly to tell theRoyal Society was this: that this old man’s mouth washost to a new kind of creature, that slid along among theothers, bending its body in graceful bows like a snake—the water in the narrow tube seemed to be alive withthose little fellows!

You may wonder that Leeuwenhoek nowhere in any ofthose hundreds of letters makes any mention of the harmthese mysterious new little animals might do to men. Hehad come upon them in drinking water, spied upon themin the mouth; as the years went by he discovered them inthe intestines of frogs and horses, and even in his owndischarges; in swarms he found them on those rare occa-

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sions when, as he says, “he was troubled with a looseness."But not for a moment did he guess that his trouble wascaused by those little beasts, and from his unimaginative-ness and his carefulness not to jump to conclusions mod-ern microbe hunters—if they only had time to study hiswritings—could learn a great deal. For, during the lastfifty years, literally thousands of microbes have been de-scribed as the authors of hundreds of diseases, when, in themajority of cases those germs have only been chance resi-dents in the body at the time it became diseased. Leeu-wenhoek was cautious about calling anything the cause ofanything else. He had a sound instinct about the infinitecomplicatedness of everything—that told him the dangerof trying to pick out one cause from the tangled maze ofcauses 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 lookedlonger and longer hours through his hundreds of micro-scopes, he made a hundred amazing discoveries. In thetail of a little fish stuck head first into a glass tube hesaw for the first time of all men the capillary blood ves-sels through which blood goes from the arteries to theveins—so he completed the Englishman Harvey’s discoveryof the circulation of the blood. The most sacred and im-proper and romantic things in life were only material forthe probing, tireless eyes of his lenses. Leeuwenhoek dis-covered the human sperm, and the cold-blooded science ofhis searching would have been shocking, if he had not beensuch a completely innocent man! The years went by andall Europe knew about him. Peter the Great of Russiacame to pay his respects to him, and the Queen of Eng-land journeyed to Delft only to look at the wonders to beseen through the lenses of his microscopes. He exploded

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countless superstitions for the Royal Society, and asidefrom Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle he was the mostfamous of their members. But did these honors turn hishead? They couldn’t turn his head because he had fromthe first a sufficiently high opinion of himself! His arro-gance was limitless—but it was equaled by his humilitywhen he thought of that misty unknown that he knewsurrounded himself and all men. He admired the DutchGod but his real god was truth:

“My determination is not to remain stubbornly withmy ideas but I’ll leave them and go over to others as soonas I am shown plausible reasons which I can grasp. Thisis the more true since I have no other purpose than toplace truth before my eyes so far as it is in my power toembrace it; and to use the little talent I have received todraw the world away from its old heathenish superstitionsand to go over to the truth and to stick to it.”

He was an amazingly healthy man, and at the age ofeighty his hand hardly trembled as he held up his micro-scope for visitors to peep at his little animals or to exclaimat the unborn oysters. But he was fond of drinking inthe evenings—as what Dutchman is not?—and his only illseems to have been a certain seedincss in the morning aftersuch wassail. He detested physicians—how could theyknow about the ills of the body when they didn’t knowone thousandth of that he did about the build of thebody? So Leeuwenhoek had his own theories—and suffi-ciently foolish they were—about the cause of this seedi-ness. He knew that his blood was full of little globules—he had been the first of all men to see them. He knewthose globules had to go through very tiny capillaries toget from his arteries to his veins—hadn’t he been the manto discover those wee vessels in a fish tail? Well, afterthose hilarious nights of his, his blood got too thick to run

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properly from the arteries to the veins! So he would thinit! So he wrote to the Royal Society:

“When I have supped too heavily of an evening, I drinkin the morning a large number of cups of coffee, andthat as hot as I can drink it, so that the sweat breaks outon me, and if by so doing I can’t restore my body, awhole apothecary’s shop couldn’t do much, and that is theonly thing I have done for years when I have felt afever.”

That hot coffee drinking led him to another curiousfact about the little animals. Everything he did led himto pry up some new fact of nature, for he lived wrappedin those tiny dramas that went on under his lenses justas a child listens open-mouthed with saucer eyes to themyths of Mother Goose. . . . He never tired of reading thesame story of nature, there were always new angles tobe found in it, the pages of his book of nature werethumbed and dog-eared by his insatiable interest. Yearsafter his discovery of the microbes in his mouth one morn-ing in the midst of his sweating from his vast curative cof-fee drinkings he looked once more at the stuff between histeeth—

What was this? There was not a single little animal tobe found. Or there were no living animals rather, for hethought he could make out the bodies of myriads of deadones—and maybe one or two that moved feebly, as if theywere sick. “Blessed Saints!” he growled: “I hope somegreat Lord of the Royal Society doesn’t try to find thosecreatures in his mouth, and fail, and then deny my obser-vations. . . .”

But look here! He had been drinking coffee, so hot ithad blistered his lips, almost. He had looked for the littleanimals in the white stuff from between his front teeth.It was just after the coffee he had looked there— Well?

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With the help of a magnifying rmrrui he went at hisback teeth. Presto! “With great surprise I saw an incrediblylarge number of little animals, and in such an unbelievablequantity of the aforementioned stuff, that it is not to be con-ceived of by those who have not seen it with their owneyes.” Then he made delicate experiments in tubes, heatingthe water with its tiny population to a temperature a littlewarmer than that of a hot bath. In a moment the crea-tures stopped their agile runnings to and fro. He cooledthe water. They did not come back to life—so! It wasthat hot coflee that had killed the beasties in his frontteeth!

With what delight he watched them once more! Buthe was bothered, he was troubled, for he couldn’t makeout the heads or tails of any of his little animals. Afterwiggling forward in one direction they stopped, they r6versed themselves and swam backward just as swiftly with-out having turned around. But they must have heads andtails! They must have livers and brains and blood vesselsas well! His thoughts floated back to his work of fortyyears before, when he had found that under his powerfullenses fleas and cheese mites, so crude and simple to thenaked eye, had become as complicated and as perfect ashuman beings. But try as he would, with the best lenseshe had, and those little animals in his mouth were justplain sticks or spheres or corkscrews. So he contented him-self by calculating, for the Royal Society, what the diam-eter of the invisible blood vessels of his microbes mustbe—but mind you, he never for a moment hinted thathe had seen such blood vessels; it only amused him tostagger his patrons by speculations of their unthinkablesmallness.

If Antony Leeuwenhoek failed to see the germs thatcause human disease, if he had too little imagination to

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predict the role of assassin for his wretched creatures, hedid show that sub-visible beasts could devour and killliving beings much larger than they were themselves. Hewas fussing with mussels, shellfish that he dredged up outof the canals of Delft. He found thousands of them un-born inside their mothers. He tried to make these youngones develop outside their mothers in a glass of canal water.“I wonder,” he muttered, “why our canals are not chokedwith mussels, when the mothers have each one so manyyoung ones inside them!” Day after day he poked aboutin his glass of water with its slimy mass of embryos, heturned his lens on to them to see if they were growing—but what was this? Astounded he watched the fishy stuffdisappear from between their shells—it was being gobbledup by thousands of tiny microbes that were attacking themussels greedily. . . .

“Life lives on life—it is cruel, but it is God’s will,” hepondered. “And it is for our good, of course, because ifthere weren’t little animals to eat up the young mussels,our canals would be choked by those shellfish, for eachmother has more than a thousand young ones at a time!”So Antony Leeuwenhoek accepted everything and praisedeverything, and in this he was a child of his time, for inhis century searchers had not yet, like Pasteur who cameafter them, begun to challenge God, to shake their fistsat the meaningless cruelties of nature toward mankind,her children. . . .

He passed eighty, and his teeth came loose as they hadto even in his strong body; he didn’t complain at the in-exorable arrival of the winter of his life, but he jerkedout that old tooth and turned his lens onto the little crea-tures he found within that hollow root—why shouldn’the study them once more? There might be some littledetail he had missed those hundred other times! Friend*

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came to him at eighty-five and told him to take it easyand leave his studies. He wrinkled his brow and openedwide his still bright eyes: “The fruits that ripen in autumnlast the longest!” he told them—he called eighty-five theautumn of his life!

Leeuwenhoek was a showman. He was very pleased tohear the ohs and ahs of people—they must be philosophicalpeople and lovers of science, mind you!—whom he letpeep into his sub-visible world or to whom he wrote hisdisjointed marvelous letters of description. But he was noteacher. “I’ve never taught one,” he wrote to the famousphilosopher Leibniz, “because if I taught one, I’d have toteach 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 Leydenwere long ago dazzled by my discoveries, they hired threelens grinders to come to teach the students, but whatcame of it?” wrote that independent Dutchman.

“Nothing, so far as I can judge, for almost all of thecourses they teach there are for the purpose of gettingmoney through knowledge or for gaining the respect ofthe world by showing people how learned you are, andthese things have nothing to do with discovering the thingsthat are buried from our eyes. I am convinred that of athousand people not one is capable of carrying out suchstudies, because endless time is needed and much moneyis spilled and because a man has always to be busy withhis 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 his deathbed,he sent for his friend Hoogvliet. He could not lift his

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hand. His once glowing eyes were rheumy and their lidswere beginning to stick fast with the cement of death. Henumbled:

“Hoogvliet, my friend, be so good as to have those twc.etters on the table translated into Latin. . . . Send themto London to the Royal Society. . . .”

So he kept his promise made fifty years before, andHoogvliet wrote, along with those last letters: “I send you,'earned sirs, this last gift of my dying friend, hoping thatlis final word will be agreeable to you.”

So he passed, this first of the microbe hunters. You willread of Spallanzani, who was much more brilliant, ofPasteur who had a thousand times his imagination, ofRobert Koch who did much more immediate apparentgood in lifting the torments that microbes bring to men—these and all the others have much more fame to-day.Rut not one of them has been so completely honest, soappallingly accurate as this Dutch janitor, and all of themcould take lessons from his splendid common sense.

CHAPTER II

SPALLANZANIMicrobes Must Have Parents!

“Leeuwenhoek is dead, it is too bad, it is a loss thatcannot be made good. Who now will carry on the studyof the little animals?” asked the learned men of the RoyalSociety in England, asked Reaumur and the brilliantAcademy in Paris. Their question did not wait long foran answer, for the janitor of Delft had hardly closed hiseyes in 1723 for the long sleep that he had earned so well,

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wnen another microbe hunter was born, in 1729 a thou-sand miles away in Scandiano in northern Italy. Thisfollower of Leeuwenhoek was Lazzaro Spallanzani, astrange boy who lisped verses while he fashioned mud-pies; who forgot mudpies to do fumbling childish andcruel experiments with beetles and bugs and flies andworms. Instead of pestering his parents with questions, heexamined living things in nature, by pulling legs andwings off them, by trying to stick them back on again.He must find out how things worked; he didn’t care sovery much what they looked like.

Like Leeuwenhoek, the young Italian had to fight tobecome a microbe hunter against the wishes of his family.His father was a lawyer and did his best to get Lazzarointerested in long sheets of legal foolscap—but the youngstersneaked away and skipped flat stones over the surface ofthe water, and wondered why the stones skipped anddidn’t sink.

In the evenings he was made to sit down before dulliessons, but when his father’s back was turned he lookedout of the window at the stars that gleamed in the velvetblack Italian sky, and next morning lectured about themto his playmates until they called him “The Astrologer.”

On holidays he pushed his burly body through thewoods near Scandiano, and came wide-eyed upon foamingnatural fountains. These made him stop his romping, andcaused him t& go home sunk in unboyish thought. Whatcaused these fountains? His folks and the priest had toldhim 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 tohimself he said “bunk” to their explanation, and made up

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? his mind to find out, some day, the real why and where-fore of fountains.

Young Spallanzani was just as determined as Leeuwen-hoek had been to find out the hidden things of nature,but he set about getting to be a scientist in an entirelydifferent way. He pondered: “My father insists that Istudy law, does he?” He kept up the pretense of beinginterested in legal documents—but in every spare momenthe boned away at mathematics and Greek and Frenchand Logic—and during his vacations watched skippingstones and fountains, and dreamed about understanding theviolent fireworks of volcanoes. Then craftily he went tothe noted scientist, Vallisnieri, and told this great manwhat he knew. “But you were born for a scientist,” saidVallisnieri, “you waste time foolishly, studying lawbooks.”

“Ah, master, but my father insists.”

Indignantly Vallisnieri went to Spallanzani senior andscolded him for throwing away Lazzaro’s talents on themerely useful study of law. “Your boy,” he said, “is goingto be a searcher, he will honor Scandiano, and make itfamous—he is like Galileo I”

And the shrewd young Spallanzani went to the Uni-versity at Reggio, with his father’s blessing, to take up thecareer of scientist.

At this time it was much more respectable and safe tobe a scientist than it had been when Leeuwenhoek be-gan his first grinding of lenses. The Grand Inquisitionwas beginning to pull in its horns. It preferred jerkingout the tongues of obscure alleged criminals and burningthe bodies of unknown heretics, to persecuting Servetusesand Galileos. The Invisible College no longer met incellars or darkened rooms, and learned societies all overwere now given the generous support of parliaments and

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kings. It was not only beginning to be permitted toquestion superstitions, it was becoming fashionable to doit. The thrill and dignity of real research into nature be-gan to elbow its way into secluded studies of philosophers.Voltaire retired for years into the wilds of rural Franceto master the great discoveries of Newton, and then topopularize them in his country. Science even penetratedinto brilliant and witty and immoral drawing-rooms, andsociety leaders like Madame de Pompadour bent theirheads over the forbidden Encyclopedia—to try to under-stand the art and science of the making of rouge and silkstockings.

Along with this excited interest in everything from themechanics of the stars to the caperings of little animals,the people of Spallanzani’s glittering century began toshow an open contempt for religion and dogmas, even themost sacred ones. A hundred years before men had riskedtheir skins to laugh at the preposterous and impossibleanimals that Aristotle had gravely put into his books onbiology. But now, they could openly snicker at the men-tion of his name and whisper: “Because he’s Aristotle itimplies that he must be believed e’en though he lies.”Still there was plenty of ignorance in the world, and muchpseudo-science—even in the Royal Societies and Academies.And Spallanzani, freed from the horror of an endlessfuture of legal wranglings, threw himself with vigor intogetting all kinds of knowledge, into testing all kinds oftheories, into disrespecting all kinds of authorities nomatter how famous, into association with every kind ofperson, from fat bishops, officials, and professors to out-landish actors and minstrels.

He was the very opposite of Leeuwenhoek, who sopatiently had ground lenses, and looked at everything fortwenty years before the learned world knew anything

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about him. At twenty-five Spallanzani made translationsof the ancient poets, and criticized the standard and muchadmired Italian translation of Homer. He brilliantlystudied mathematics with his cousin, Laura Bassi, thefamous woman professor of Reggio. He now skippedstones over the water in earnest, and wrote a scientificpaper on the mechanics of skipping stones. He became apriest of the# Catholic Church, and helped support him-self by saying masses.

Despising secretly all authority, he got himself snuglyinto the good graces of powerful authorities, so that hemight work undisturbed. Ordained a priest, supposed tobe a blind follower of the faith, he fell savagely toquestioning everything, to taking nothing for granted—excepting the existence of God, of some sort of supremebeing. At least if he questioned this he kept it—roguethat he was—strictly to himself. Before he was thirtyyears old he had been made professor at the University ofReggio, talking before enthusiastic classes that listened tohim with saucer-eyes. Here he started his first work onthe little animals, those weird new little beings thatLeeuwenhoek had discovered. He began his experimentson them as they were threatening to return to that mistyunknown from which the Dutchman had dredged themup-

The little animals had got themselves involved in astrange question, in a furious fight, and had it not beenfor 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 aboutwhich professors tried to crack the skulls of priests, wasbriefly this: Can living things arise spontaneously, or doesevery living thing have to have parents? Did God createevery plant and animal in the first six days, and then

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settle down to be Managing Director of the universe, ordoes He even now amuse Himself by allowing new ani-mals to spring up in humorous ways?

In Spallanzani’s time the popular side was the party thatasserted that life could arise spontaneously. The greatmajority of sensible people believed that many animals didnot have to have parents—that they might be the unhappyillegitimate children of a disgusting variety o^ dirty messes.Here, for example, was a supposedly sure recipe for gettingyourself a good swarm of bees. Take a young bullock, killhim with a knock on the head, bury him under the groundin a standing position with his horns sticking out. Leavehim there for a month, then saw off his horns—and outwill fly your swarm of bees.

ii

Even the scientists were on this side of the question.The English naturalist Ross announced learnedly that:“To question that beetles and wasps were generated incow dung is to question reason, sense, and experience.”Even such complicated animals as mice didn’t have to havemothers or fathers—if anybody doubted this, let him goto Egypt, and there he would find the fields literallyswarming with mice, begot of the mud of the River Nile—to the great calamity of the inhabitants!

Spallanzani heard all of these stories which so many im-portant people were sure were facts, he read many moreof them that were still more strange, he watched studentsget into brawls in excited attempts to prove that miceand bees didn’t have to have fathers or mothers. He heardall of these things—and didn’t believe them. He wasprejudiced. Great advances in science so often start fromprejudice, on ideas got not from science but straight outof a scientist’s head, on notions that are only the opposite

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of the prevailing superstitious nonsense of the day. Spal-lanzani had violent notions about whether life could risespontaneously; for him it was on the face of things absurdto think that animals—even the wee beasts of Leeuwen-hoek—could arise in a haphazard way from any old thingor out of any dirty mess. There must be law and orderto their birth, there must be a rime and reason! But howto prove it?

Then one night, in his solitude, he came across a littlebook, a simple and innocent little book, and this booktold him of an entirely new way to tackle the questionof how life arises. The fellow who wrote the book didn’targue with words—he just made experiments—and God!thought Spallanzani, how clear are the facts he demon-strates. He stopped being sleepy and forgot the dawn wascoming, and read on. . . .

The book told him of the superstition about the gener-ation of maggots and flies, it told of how even the mostintelligent men believed that maggots and flies could ariseout of putrid meat. Then—and Spallanzani’s eyes nearlypopped out with wonder, with excitement, as he read of a.little experiment that blew up this nonsense, once and foralways.

“A great man, this fellow Redi, who wrote this book/’thought Spallanzani, as he took off his coat and bent histhick neck toward the light of the candle. “See how easyhe settles it! He takes two jars and puts some meat ineach one. He leaves one jar open and then puts a lightveil over the other one. He watches—and sees flies godown into the meat in the open pot—and in a little whilethere are maggots there, and then new flies. He looks atthe jar that has the veil over it—and there are no maggotsor flies in that one at all. How easy! It is just a matterof the veil keeping the mother flies from getting at the

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meat. . . . But how clever, because for a thousand yearspeople have been getting out of breath arguing about thequestion—and not one of them thought of doing thissimple experiment that settles it in a moment.”

Next morning it was one jump from the inspiring bookto tackling this same question, not with flies, but with themicroscopic animals. For all the professors were sayingjust then that though maybe flies had to come from eggs,little sub-visible animals certainly could rise by themselves.

Spallanzani began fumblingly to learn how to grow weebeasts, and how to use a microscope. He cut his handsand broke large expensive flasks. He forgot to clean hislenses and sometimes saw his little animals dimly throughhis fogged glasses—just as you can faintly make out min-nows in the water riled up by your net. He raved at hisblunders; he was not the dogged worker that Leeuwen-hoek had been—but despite his impetuousness he was per-sistent—he must prove that these yarns about the animal-cules were yarns, nothing more. But wait! “If I set outto prove something I am no real scientist—I have to learn•to follow where the facts lead me—I have to learn to whipmy prejudices. . . And he kept on learning to studylittle animals, and to observe wilh a patient, if not anunprejudiced eye, and gradually he taught the vanity ofhis ideas to bow to the hard clearness of his facts.

At this time another priest, named Needham, a devoutCatholic who liked to think he could do experiments, wasbecoming notoiious in England and Ireland, claiming thatlittle microscopic animals were generated marvelously inmutton gravy. Needham sent his experiments to the RoyalSociety, and the learned Fellows deigned to be impressed.

He told them how he had taken a quantity of muttongravy hot from the fire, and put the gravy in a bottle,and plugged the bottle up tight with a cork, so that no. 32

little animals or their eggs could possibly get into the gravyfrom the air. Next he even went so far as to heat thebottle and its mutton gravy in hot ashes. “Surely,” saidthe good Needham, “this will kill any little animals ortheir eggs, that might remain in the flask.” He put thisgravy flask away for a few days, then pulled the cork—and marvel of marvels—when he examined the stuff insidewith his lens, he found it swarming with animalcules.

“A momentous discovery, this,” cried Needham to theRoyal Society, “these little animals can only have comefrom the juice of the gravy. Here is a real experimentshowing that life can come spontaneously from deadstuff!” He told them mutton-gravy wasn’t necessary—asoup made from seeds or almonds would do the sametrick.

The Royal Society and the whole educated world wereexcited by Needham’s discovery. Here was no Old Wives'tale. Here was hard experimental fact; and the heads ofthe Society got together and thought about making Need-ham a Fellow of their remote aristocracy of learning.But away in Italy, Spallanzani was reading the news ofNeedham’s startling creation of little animals from muttongravy. While he read he knit his brows, and narrowedhis dark eyes. At last he snorted: “Animalcules do notarise by themselves from mutton gravy, or almond seeds,or anything else! This fine experiment is a fraud—maybeNeedham 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 Spal-lanzani began to sharpen his razors for his fellow priest—the Italian was a nasty fellow who liked to slaughter ideasof any kind that were contrary to his—he began to whethis knives, I say, for Needham. Then one night, alone inhis laboratory, away from the brilliant clamor of his lec-

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tures and remote from the gay salons where ladies adoredhis knowledge, he felt sure he had found the loophole inNeedham’s experiment. He chewed his quill, he ran hishands through his shaggy hair, “Why have those little ani-mals appeared in that hot gravy, and in those soups madefrom seeds?” Undoubtedly because Needham didn’t heatthe bottles long enough, and surely because he didn’t plugthem tight enough!

Here the searcher in him came forward—he didn’t goto his desk to write Needham about it—instead he wentto his dusty glass-strewn laboratory, and grabbed someflasks and seeds, and dusted off his microscope. He startedout to test, even to defeat, if necessary, his own ex-planations. Needham didn’t heat his soups long enough—maybe there are little animals, or their eggs, which canstand a tremendous heat, who knows? So Spallanzanitook some large glass flasks, round bellied with taperingnecks. He scrubbed and washed and dried them till theystood in gleaming rows on his table. Then he put seedsof various kinds into some, and peas and almonds intoothers, and following that poured pure water into all ofthem. “Now I won’t only heat these soups for a shorttime,” he cried, “but I’ll boil them for an hour!” He gothis fires ready—then he grunted: “But how shall I closeup my flasks? Corks might not be tight enough, theymight let these infinitely wee things through.” He pon-dered. “I’ve got it, I’ll melt the necks of my bottles shutin a flame. I’ll close them with glass—nothing, no matterhow small, can sneak through glass!”

So he took his shining flasks one by one, and rolled theirnecks gently in a hot flame till each one was fused com-pletely shut. He dropped some of them when they gottoo hot—he sizzled the skin of his fingers, he swore, andgot new flasks to take the smashed ones’ places. Then

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when Ins flasks were all sealed and ready, “Now for somereal heat,” he muttered, and for tedious hours he tendedhis bottles, as they bumped and danced in caldrons ofboiling 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 liftedthe flasks of stew steaming from their kettles, and putthem carefully away—to wait for nervous anxious daysto see whether any little animals would grow in them.And he did another thing, a simple one which I almostforgot to tell you about, he made another duplicate setof stews in flasks plugged up with corks, not sealed, andafter boiling these for an hour put them away beside theothers.

Then he went oil for days to do the thousand thingsthat were not enough to use up his buzzing energy. Hewrote letters to the famous naturalist Bonnet, in Switzer-land, telling him his experiments; he played football; hewent hunting and fishing. He lectured about science, andtold his students not of dry technicalities only, but of ahundred things—from the marvelous wee beasts that Leeu-wenhoek had found in his mouth to the1 strange eunuchsand the veiled multitudinous wives of Turkish harems.At last he vanished and students and professors—andladies—asked: “Where is the Abbe Spallanzani?”

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

m

He went to the row of sealed flasks first, and one by onehe cracked open their necks, and fished down with a slen-der hollow tube to get some of the soup inside them, inorder to see whether any little animals at all had grownin these bottles that he had heated so long, and closed soperfectly against the microscopic creatures that might be

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floating in the dust of the outside air. He was not thelively sparkling Spallanzani now. He was slow, he wascalm. Like some automaton, some slightly animatedwooden man he put one drop of seed-soup after anotherbefore his lens.

He first looked at drop after drop of the soup from thesealed flasks which had been boiled for an hour, and hislong looking was rewarded by—nothing. Eagerly heturned to the bottles that had been boiled for only a fewminutes, and cracked their seals as before, and put dropsof the soup inside them before his lens.

“What’s this?” he cried. Here and there in the grayfield of his lens he made out an animalcule playing andsporting about—these weren’t large microbes, like somehe had seen—but they were living little animals just thesame.

“Why, they look like little fishes, tiny as ants,” hemuttered—and then something dawned on him—“Theseflasks were sealed—nothing could get into them fromthe outside, yet here are little beings that have stooda heat of boiling water for several minutes!”

He went with'nervous hands to the long row of flaskshe had only stoppered with corks—as his enemy Need-ham had done—and he pulled out the corks, one by one, andfished in the bottles once more with his tubes. He growledexcitedly, he got up from his chair, he seized a batterednotebook and feverishly wrote down obscure remarks ina kind of scrawled shorthand. But these words meantthat every one of the flasks which had been only corked,not sealed, was alive with little animals! Even the corkedflasks which had been boiled for an hour, “were like lakesin which swim fishes of all sizes, from whales to min-nows.”

“That means the little animals get into Needham’s

36

flasks from the air!” he shouted. “And besides I have dis-covered a great new fact: living things exist that can standsboiling water and still live—you have to heat them toboiling almost an hour to kill them!”

It was a great day for Spallanzani, and though he didnot know it, a great day for the world. Spallanzani hadproved that Needham’s theory of little animals arisingspontaneously was wrong—just as the old master Redihad proved the idea was wrong that flies can be bred inputrid meat, But he had done more than that, for he hadrescued the baby science of microbe hunting from a fan-tastic myth, a Mother Goose yarn that would have madeall scientists of other kinds hold their noses at the verymention of microbe hunting as a branch of knowledge.

Excited, Spallanzani called his brother Nicolo, andhis sister, and told them his pretty experiment. And then,bright-eyed, he told his students that life only comesfrom life; every living thing has to have a parent—eventhese wretched little animals! Seal your soup flasks in aflame, and nothing can get into them from outside. Heatthem long enough, and everything, even those toughbeasts that can stand boiling, will be killed. Do that, andyou’ll never find any living animals arising in any kindof soup—you could keep it till doomsday. Then he threwhis work at Needham’s head in a brilliant sarcastic paper,and the world of science was thrown into an uproar.Could Needham really be wrong? asked thoughtful men,gathered in groups under the high lamps and candles ofthe scientific societies of London and Copenhagen, of Parisand Berlin.

The argument between Spallanzani and Needham didn’tstay in the academies among the highbrows. It leaked outthrough heavy doors onto the streets and crept into stylishdrawingrooms. The world would have liked to believe

37

Needham, for the people of the eighteenth century werecynical and gay; everywhere men were laughing at religionand denying any supreme power in nature, and they de-lighted in the notion that life could arise haphazardly.But Spallanzanis experiments were so clear and so hard toanswer, even with the cleverest words. . . .

Meanwhile the good Needham had not been resting onhis oars exactly; he was an expert at publicity, and to helphis cause along he went to Paris and lectured about hismutton gravy, and in Paris he fell in with the famousCount Buffon. This count was rich; he was handsome;he loved to write about science; he believed he could makeup hard facts in his head; he was rather too well dressedto do experiments. Besides he really knew some mathe-matics, and had translated Newton into French. Whenyou consider that he could juggle most complicated figures,that he was a rich nobleman as well, you will agree thathe certainly ought to know—without experimenting—whether little animals could come to life without fathersor mothers! So argued the godless wits of Paris.

Needham and Buffon got on famously. Buffon worepurple clothes and lace cuffs that he didn’t like to mussup on dirty laboratory tables, with their dust and clutteredglassware and pools of soup spilled from accidentallybroken flasks. So he did the thinking and writing, whileNeedham messed with the experiments. These two menthen set about to invent a great theory of how life arises,a fine philosophy that every one could understand, thatwould suit devout Christians as well as witty atheists.The theory ignored Spallanzani’s cold facts, but whatwould you have? It came from the brain of the greatBuffon, and that was enough to upset any fact, no matterhow hard, no matter how exactly recorded.

“What is it that causes these little animals to arise in

3«

mutton gravy, even after it has been heated, my .Lora?”you can hear Needham asking of the noble count. CountBuffon’s brain whirled in a magnificent storm of the im-agination, then he answered: “You have made a great, amost momentous discovery, Father Needham. You haveput your finger on the very source of life. In your muttongravy you have uncovered the very force—it must be aforce, everything is force—which creates life!”

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

“An apt name,” said Buflon, and he retired to his per-fumed study and put on his best suit and wrote—notfrom dry laboratory notes or the exact records of lenses orflasks but from his brain—he wrote, I say, about the mar-vels of this Vegetative Force that could make little ani-mals out of mutton gravy and heated seed soups. In alittle while Vegetative Force was on everybody’s tongue.It accounted for everything. The wits made it take theplace of God, and the churchmen said it was God’s mostpowerful weapon. It was popular like a street song or anoff color story—or like present day talk about relativity.

Worst of all, the Royal Society tumbled over itself toget ahead of the men in the street, and elected Needhama Fellow, and the Academy of Sciences of Paris made himan Associate. Meanwhile in Italy Spallanzani began towalk up and down his laboratory and sputter and rage.Here was a danger to science, here was ignoring of coldfacts, without which science is nothing. Spallanzani was apriest of God, and God was perhaps reasonably sacred tohim, he didn’t argue with any one about that—but herewas a pair of fellows who ignored his pretty experiments,his clear beautiful facts!

But what could Spallanzani do? Needham and Buffonhad deluged the scientific world with words—they had

39

not answered his facts, they had not shown where Spal-lanzani’s experiment of the sealed flasks was wrong. TheItalian was a fighter, but he liked to fight with facts andexperiments, and here he was laying about him in this fogof big words, and hitting nothing. Spallanzani stormedand laughed and was sarcastic and bitter about this mar-velous hoax, this mysterious Vegetative Force. It was theForce, prattled Needham, that had made Eve grow outof Adam’s rib. It was the Force, once more, that gaverise to the remarkable worm-tree of China, which is aworm in winter, and then marvelous to say is turned bythe Vegetative Force into a tree in summer! And muchmore of such preposterous stuff, until Spallanzani saw thewhole science of living things in danger of being upset,by this alleged Vegetative Force with which, next thingpeople knew, Needham would be turning cows into menand fleas into elephants.

Then suddenly Spallanzani had his chance, for Needhammade an objection to one of his experiments. “Your experi-ment does not hold water,” he wrote to the Italian, “be-cause you have heated your flasks for an hour, and thatfierce heat weakens and so damages the Vegetative Forcethat it can no longer make little animals.”

This was just what the energetic Spallanzani was wait-ing for, and he forgot religion and large classes of eagerstudents and the pretty ladies that loved to be shownthrough his museum. He rolled up his wide sleeves andplunged into work, not at a writing desk but before hislaboratory bench, not with a pen, but with his flasks andseeds 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

40

weigh or measure this Vegetative Force? He says it is inthe seeds, well, we’ll heat the seeds and seel”

Spallanzani got out his flasks once more and cleanedthem. He brewed mixtures of different kinds of seeds, ofpeas and beans and vetches with pure water, until hiswork room almost ran over with flasks—they perched onhigh shelves, they sat on tables and chairs, they clutteredthe floor so it was hard to walk around.

“Now, we’ll boil a whole series of these flasks differentlengths of time, and see which one generates the mostlittle animals,” he said, and then doused one set of hissoups in boiling water for a few minutes, another for ahalf hour, another for an hour, and still another for twohours. Instead of sealing them in the flame he pluggedthem all up with corks—Needham said that was enough—and then he put them carefully away to see what wouldhappen. He waited. He went off fishing and forgot topull up his rod when a fish bit, he collected minerals forhis museum, and forgot to take them home with him.He plotted for higher pay, he said masses, and studied thecopulation of frogs and toads—and then disappeared oncemore to his dim work room with its regiments of bottlesand weird machines. He waited.

If Needham were right, the flasks boiled for minutesshould be alive with little animals, but the ones boiledfor an hour or two hours should be deserted. He pulledout the corks one by one, and looked at the drops of soupthrough his lens and at last laughed with delight—thebottles that had been boiled for two hours actually hadmore little animals sporting about in them than the onesjhe 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 get5n from the air. You can heat your soups till you’re black

4*

in the face—the microbes will get in just the same andgrow, after the broth has cooled.”

Spallanzani was triumphant, but then he did the curiousthing that only born scientists ever do—he tried to beat hisown idea, his darling theory—by experiments he honestlyand 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 theirown cherished whims and wishes. Spallanzani walked upand down his narrow work room, hands behind him,meditating—“Wait, maybe after all Needham has guessedright, maybe there is some mysterious force in these seedsthat strong heat might destroy.”

Then he cleaned his flasks again, and took some seeds,but instead of merely boiling them in water, he put themin a coffee-roaster and baked them till they were soot-colored cinders. Next he poured pure distilled water overthem, growling: “Now if there was a Vegetative Forcein those seeds, I have surely roasted it to death.”

Days later when he came back to his flasks, with theirsoups brewed from the burned seeds, he smiled a sarcasticsmile—a smile that meant squirming for Buffon andiNeedham—for as one bottle after another yielded its dropsof soup to his lens, every drop from every bottle was alivewith wee animals that swam up and down in the liquidand went to and fro, living their funny limited little livesas gayly as any animals in the best soup made from un-burned seeds. He had tried to defeat his own theory, andso trying had licked the pious Needham and the preciousBuffon. They had said that heat would kill their Forceso that no little animals could arise—and here were seedscharred to carbon, furnishing excellent food for the smallcreatures—this so-called Force was a myth! Spallanzani

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proclaimed this to all of Europe, which now began tolisten to him.

Then he relaxed from his hard pryings into the loves andbattles and deaths of little animals by making deep studiesof the digestion of food in the human stomach—and to dothis he experimented cruelly on himself. This was notenough, so he had to launch into weird investigations inthe hot dark attic of his house, on the strange problem ofhow bats can keep from bumping into things althoughthey cannot see. In the midst of this he found time tohelp educate his little nephews and to take care of hisbrother and sister, obscure beings who did not share hisgenius—but they were of his blood, and he loved them.

But he soon came back to the mysterious question ofhow life arises, that question which his religion taughthim to ignore, to accept with blind faith as a miracle ofthe Creator. He didn’t work with little animals only;instead he turned his curiosity onto larger ones, and beganvast researches on the mating of toads. “What is the causeof the violent and persistent way in which the male toadholds the female?” he asked himself, and his wonder atthis strange event set his ingenious brain to devising ex-periments of an unheard-of barbarity.

He didn’t do them out of any fiendish whim to hurt thefather toad—but this man must know every fact that couldpossibly be known about how new toads arose. What willmake the toad let go this grip? And that mad priest cutoff a male toad’s hind legs in the midst of its copulation—but the dying animal did not relax that blind grasp towhich nature drove it. Spallanzani mused over his bizarreexperiment. “This persistence of the toad,” he said, “is dueless to his obtuseness of feeling than to the vehemence ofhis passion.”

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In his sniffing search for knowledge which let him stopat nothing, he was led by an instinct that drove him intoheartless experiments on animals—but it made him doequally cruel and fantastic tests on himself. He studiedthe digestion of food in the stomach, he gulped downhollowed-out blocks of wood with meat inside them, thentickled his throat and made himself vomit them up againso that he could find out what had happened to the meatinside the blocks. He kept insanely at this self-torture,until, as he admitted at last, a horrid nausea made himstop the experiments.

Spallanzani held immense correspondences with half thedoubters and searchers of Europe. By mail he was a greatfriend of that imp, Voltaire. He complained that therewere few men of talent in Italy, the air was too humidand foggy—he became a leader of that impudent band ofscientists and philosophers who unknowingly prepared thebloodiest of revolutions while they tried so honestly tofind truth and establish happiness and justice in the world.These men believed that Spallanzani had spiked once forall that nonsense about animals—even the tiniest ones—arising spontaneously. Led by Voltaire they cracked vastjokes about the Vegetative Force and its parents, the pom-pous Buffon and his laboratory boy, Father Needham.

“But there is a Vegetative Force,” cried Needham, “amysterious something—I’ll admit you can’t see it orweigh it—that can make life arise out of gravy or soup orout of nothing at all, perhaps. Maybe it can stand all ofthat roasting that Spallanzani applies to it, but what itneeds particularly is a very elastic air to help it. Andwhen Spallanzani boils his flasks for an hour, he hurts theelasticity of the air inside the flasks!”

Spallanzani was up in arms in a moment, and bawledfor Needham’s experiments. “Has he heated air to see if

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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 andscaled off their necks in a flame—and boiled them for anhour. Then one morning he went to his laboratory, andcracked 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 bottleand cracked off its neck, holding his ear close by,Wh-i-s-s-st! There it was again. “That means the air iscoming out of my bottle, or going into it,” he cried, andhe lighted a candle and ingeniously held it near the neckof 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 isless elastic than the air outside, that means maybe Need-ham is right!”

For a moment Spallanzani had a queer feeling at thepit of his stomach, his forehead was wet with nervoussweat, his world tottered around him. . . . Could thatfool Needham have made a lucky stab, a clever guessabout what heat did to air in sealed up flasks? Could thiswindbag knock out all of this careful finding of facts,which had taken so many years of hard work? For daysSpallanzani went about troubled, and snapped at studentsto whom before he had been gentle, and tried to comforthimself by reciting Dante and Homer—and this only madehim more grumpy. A relentless torturing imp prickedat him and this imp said: “Find out why the air rushesinto your flasks when you break the seals—it may not haveanything to do with elasticity.” The imp woke him upin the night, it made him get tangled up in hismasses. . . .

Then like a flash of lightning the explanation came to

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him and he hurried to his work bench—it was coveredwith broken flasks and abandoned bottles and its muddleddisarray told his discouragement—he reached into a cup-board and took out one of his flasks. He was on the track,he would show Needham was wrong, and even beforehe had proved it he stretched himself with a heave of re-lief—so sure was he that the reason for the little whistlingof air had come to him. He looked at the flasks, thensmiled and said, “All the flasks that I have been using havefairly wide necks. When I seal them in the flame it takesa 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 beforeit’s sealed up. No wonder the air rushes in when I crackthe seal!”

He saw that Needham’s idea that boiling water outsidethe flask damaged the elasticity of the air inside was non-sense, nothing less. But how to prove this, how to sealup the flasks without driving out the air? His devilishingenuity 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 bottle around in a hotflame until it melted down to a tiny narrow opening—very, very narrow, but still open to the air outside. Nexthe let the flask cool—now the air inside must be the sameas the air outside—then he applied a tiny flame to the nowalmost needle-fine opening. In a jiffy the flask was sealed—without expelling any of the air from the inside. Con-tent, he put the bottle in boiling water and watched itbump and dance in the kettle for an hour and while hewatched he recited verses and hummed gay tunes. Heput the flask away for days, then one morning, sure ofhis result, he came to his laboratory to open it. He lighteda candle; he held it close to the flask neck; carefully hebroke the seal—wh-i-s-s-s-t! But the flame blew away

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from the flask this time—the elasticity of the air insick theflask 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 waswhat Needham said was necessary for his wonderful Vege-tative Force. The air in the flask was super-elastic,but fishing drop after drop of the soup inside, Spallanzanicouldn’t find a single little animal. Again and again, withthe obstinacy of a Leeuwenhoek, he repeated the same ex-periment. He broke flasks and spilled boiling water downhis shirt-front, he seared his hands, he made vast tests thathad to be done over—but always he confirmed his firstresult.

Triumphant he shouted his last experiment to Europe,and Needham and Buffon heard it, and had to sit sullenlyamid the ruins of their silly theory, there was nothing tosay—Spallanzani had spiked their guns with a simple fact.Then the Italian sat down to do a little writing himself.fit virtuoso in the laboratory, he was a fiend with his quill,when once he was sure his facts had destroyed Needham’spleasant myth about life arising spontaneously. Spallanzaniwas sure now that even the littlest beasts had to come—always—from beasts that had lived before. He was cer-tain too, that a wee microbe always remained a microbeof the same kind that its parents had been, just as a zebradoesn’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 I have proved that there is a law and order in thescience of animals, just as there is in the working of thestars.”

Then he told the muddle that Needham would

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have turned the science of little animals into—if goodfacts hadn’t been found to beat him. What animals thisweird Vegetative Force could make—what tricks it coulddo—if it had only existed! “It could make,” said Spallan-zani, “a microscopic animal found sometimes in infusions,which like a new Protean, ceaselessly changes its form,appearing now as a body thin as a thread, now in anoval or spherical form, sometimes coiled like a serpent,adorned with rays and armed with horns. This remark-able animal furnishes Needham an example, to explaineasily how the Vegetative Force produces now a frog andagain a dog, sometimes a midge and at others an elephant,to-day a spider and to-morrow a whale, this minute acow and the next a man.”

So ended Needham—and his Vegetative Force. It be-came comfortable to live once more; you felt sure therewas no mysterious sinister Force sneaking around waitingto change you into a hippopotamus.

Spallanzani’s name glittered in all the universities ofEurope; the societies considered him the first scientistof the day; Frederick the Great wrote long letters to himand with his own hand made him a member of the BerlinAcademy; and Frederick’s bitter enemy, Maria Theresa,Empress of Austria, put it over the great king by offeringSpallanzani the job of professor in her ancient and run-down University of Pavia, in Lombardy. A pompous com-mission come, a commission of eminent Privy Councillorsweighed down with letters and Imperial Seals and beggedSpallanzani to put this defunct college on its feet. Therewere vast interminable arguments and bargainings aboutsalary—Spallanzani always knew how to feather his nest—bargains that ended in his taking the job of Professor ofNatural History and Curator of the Natural HistoryCabinet of Pavia.

Spallanzani went to the Museum, the Natural HistoryCabinet, and found that cupboard bare. He rolled up hissleeves, h£ lectured about everything, he made huge pub-lic experiments and he awed his students because his defthands always made these experiments turn out success-fully. He sent here and there for an astounding array ofqueer beasts and strange plants and unknown birds—tofill up the empty Cabinet. He climbed dangerous moun-tains himself and brought back minerals and precious ores;he caught hammer-head sharks and snared gay-plumedfowl; he went on incredible collecting expeditions for hismuseum—and to work off that tormenting energy thatmade him so fantastically different from the popular pic-ture of a calm scientist. He was a Roosevelt with all ofTeddy’s courage and appeal to the crowd, but with noneof Teddy’s gorgeous inaccuracy.

In the intervals of this hectic collecting and lecturing heshut himself in his laboratory with his stews and hismicroscopic animals, and made long experiments to showthat these beasts obey nature’s laws, just as men and horsesand elephants are forced to follow them. He put drops ofstews swarming with microbes on little pieces of glassand blew tobacco smoke at them and watched themeagedy with his lens. He cried out his delight as he sawthem rush about trying to avoid the irritating smoke. Heshot electric sparks at them and wondered at the way thelittle animals “became giddy” and spun about, and quicklydied.

“The seeds or eggs of the little animals may be differentfrom chicken eggs or frog’s eggs or fish eggs—they maystand the heat of boiling water in my sealed flasks—butotherwise these little creatures are really no different fromother animals!” he cried. Then just after that he had totake back his confident words. . . .

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“Every beast on earth needs air to live, and I am goingto show just how animal these little animals are by put-ting them in a vacuum—and watching them *die,” saidSpallanzani to himself, alone one day in his laboratory.He cleverly drew out some very thin tubes of glass, likethe ones Leeuwenhoek had used to study his little ani-mals. He dipped the tube into a soup that swarmed withhis microbes; the fluid rushed up into the hair-fine pipe.Then Spallanzani sealed off one end of it, and ingeniouslytied the other end to a powerful vacuum pump, and setthe pump going, and stuck his lens against the thin wallof the tube. He expected to see the wee animals stopwaving the “little arms which they were furnished toswim with;” he expected them to get giddy and thenstop moving. . . .

The pump chugged on—and nothing whatever happenedto the microbes. They went nonchalantly about their busi-ness and did not seem to realize there was such a thing wlife-maintaining air! They lived for days, for weeks—and Spallanzani did the experiment again and again, try-ing to find something wrong with it. This was impossible—nothing can live without air—how the devil do thesebeasts breathe? He wrote his amazement in a letter tohis friend Bonnet:

“The nature of some of these animalcules is astonishing!They are able to exercise in a vacuum the functions theyuse in free air. They make all of their courses, they goup and down in the liquid, they even multiply for severaldays in this vacuum. How wonderful this is! For wehave always believed there is no living being that can livewithout the advantages air offers it.”

Spallanzani was very proud of his imagination and hisquick brain and he was helped along in this conceit bythe flattery and admiration of students and intelligent

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ladies and learned professors and conquering kings. Buihe was an experimenter too—he was really an experimenterfirst, he bent his head humbly when a new fact defeatedone of the brilliant guesses of his brain.

Meanwhile this man who was so rigidly honest in hisexperiments, who would never report anything but thetruth of what he found amid the smells and poisonousvapors and shining machines of his laboratory, this superblyhonest scientist, I say, was planning low tricks to increasehis pay as Professor at Pavia. Spallanzani, the footballplayer, the climber of mountains and explorer, this Spal-lanzani whined to the authorities at Vienna about hisfeeble health—the fogs and vapors of Pavia were like tomake him die, he said. To keep him the Emperor hadto increase his pay and double his vacations. Spallanzanilaughed and cynically called his lie a political gesture!He always got everything he wanted. He got truth bydazzling experiments and close observation and insanepatience; he obtained money and advancement by work—and by cunning plots and falsehoods; he received pro-tection from religious persecution by becoming a priest!

Now, as he grew older, he began to hanker tor wildresearches in regions remote from his little laboratory. Hemust visit the site of ancient Troy whose story thrilledhim so; he must see the harems and slaves and eunuchs,which to him were as much a part of natural history ashis bats and toads and little animals of the seed infusions.He pulled wires, and at last the Emperor Joseph gave hirna year’s leave of absence and the money for a trip to Con-stantinople—for his failing health, which had never beenmore superb.

So Spallanzani put his rows of flasks away and lockedhis laboratory and said a dramatic and tearful good-by tohis students; on the journey down the Mediterranean he

got frightfully sea-sick, he was shipwrecked—but didn’tforget to try to save the specimens he had collected onsome islands. The Sultan wined and dined him, thedoctors of the seraglios let him study the customs of thebeauteous concubines . . . and afterwards, good eighteenthcentury European that he was, Spallanzani told the Turksthat he admired their hospitality and their architecture,but detested their custom of slavery and their hopelessfatalistic view of life. . . .

“We Westerners, through this new science of ours, aregoing to conquer the seemingly unavoidable, the ap-parently eternal torture and suffering of man,” you canimagine him telling his polite but stick-in-the-mudOriental friends. He believed in an all powerful God, butwhile he believed, the spirit of the 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 Natureand the Unknown, compelled him to show that he hadappointed himself first-assistant to God in the discoveryand even the conquering of this unknown Nature.

After many months he returned overland through theBalkan Peninsula, escorted by companies of crack soldiers,entertained by Bulgarian dukes and Wallachian Hospo-dars. At last he came to Vienna, to pay his respects to hisboss and patron, the Emperor Joseph II—it was the dizzi-est moment, so far as honors went, of his entire career.Drunk with success, he thought, you may imagine, ofhow all of his dreams had come true, and then

VI

While Spallanzani was on his triumphant voyage a darkcloud gathered away to the south, at his university, theschool at Pavia that he had done so much to bring backto life. For years the other professors had watched him

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take their students away from them, they had watched—and ground their tusks and sharpened their razors—andwaited.

Spallanzani by tireless expeditions and through manyfatigues and dangers had made the once empty NaturalHistory Cabinet the talk of Europe. Besides he had a littleprivate collection of his own at his old home in Scandiano.One day, Canon Volta, one of his jealous enemies, wentto Scandiano and by a trick got into Spallanzani’s privatemuseum; he sniffed around, then smiled an evil grin—here were some jars, and there a bird and in another placea fish, and all of them were labeled with the red tags of theUniversity museum of Pavia! Volta sneaked them away hid-den in the dark folds of his cloak, and on the way homeworked out his malignant plans to cook the brilliant Spal-lanzani’s goose; and just before Spallanzani got homefrom Vienna, Volta and Scarpa and Scopoli let hell looseby publishing a tract and sending it to every great manand society in Europe, and this tract accused Spallanzaniof the nasty crime of stealing specimens from the Univer-sity of Pavia and hiding them in his own little museumat Scandiano. '

His bright world came down around his ears; in a mo-ment he saw his gorgeous career in ruins; in hideousdreams he heard the delighted cackles of men who praisedhim and envied him; he pictured the triumph of menwhom he had soundly licked with his clear facts and ex-periments—he imagined even the return to life of thatfool Vegetative Force. . . .

But in a few days he came back on his feet, the centerof a dreadful scandal, it is true, but on his feet with hisback to the wall ready to face his accusers. Gone nowwas the patient hunter of microbes and gone the urbanecorrespondent of Voltaire. He turned into a crafty poli

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tician, he demanded an investigating committee and gotit, he founded Ananias Clubs, he fought fire with fire.

He returned to Pavia and on his way there I wonderwhat his thoughts were—did he see himself slinking intothe town, avoided by old admirers and a victim of malig-nant hissing whispers? Possibly, but as he got near thegates of Pavia a strange thing happened—for a mob ofadoring students came out to meet him, told him theywould stick by him, escorted him with yells of joy to hisold lecture chair. The once self-sufficient, proud man’svoice became husky—he blew his nose—he could onlystutteringly tell them what their devotion meant to him.

Then the investigating committee had him and his ac-cusers appear before it, and knowing Spallanzani as youalready do, you may imagine the shambles that followed!He proved to the judges that the alleged stolen birds weremiserably stuffed, draggle-feathered creatures which wouldhave disgraced the cabinet of a country school—they hadbeen merely pitched out. He had traded the lost snakesand the armadillo to other museums and Pavia had prof-ited by the trade; not only so, but Volta, his chief ac-cuser, had himself stolen precious stones from the museumand 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; Voltaand his co-plotters were fired from the University, andall parties, including Spallanzani, were ordered by the Em-peror to stop their deplorable brawling and shut up—thisthing was getting to be a smell all over Europe—studentswere breaking up the classroom furniture about it, andother universities were snickering at such an unparalleledscandal. Spallanzani took a last crack at his routedenemies; he called Volta a perfect bladder full of windand invented hideous and unprintably improper names

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for Scarpa and Scopoli; then he returned peacefully to hismicrobe hunting.

Many times in his long years of looking at the animal-cules he had wondered how they multiplied. Often hehad seen two of the wee beasts stuck together, and hewrote to Bonnet: “When you see two individuals of anyanimal kind united, you naturally think they are engagedin reproducing themselves.” But were they? He jottedhis observations down in old notebooks and made crudepictures of them, but, impetuous as he was in manythings, when it came to experiments or drawing conclu-sions—he was almost as cagy as old Leeuwenhoek hadbeen.

Bonnet told Spallanzani’s perplexity about the way littleanimals multiplied to his friend, the clever but now un-known de Saussure. And this fellow turned his sharpeye through his clear lenses onto the breeding habits ofanimalcules. In a short while he wrote a classic paper,telling the fact that when you see two of the small beastsstuck together, they haven’t come together to breed. Onthe contrary—marvelous to say—these coupled beasts arenothing more nor less than an old animalcule which isdividing into two parts, into two new little animals! This,said de Saussure, was the only way the microbes ever mul-tiplied—the joys of marriage were unknown to them!

Reading this paper, Spallanzani rushed to his micro-scope 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 congratulatinghim; Spallanzani was a fighter and something of a plot-ter; he was infernally ambitious and often jealous of the ,fame of other men, but he lost himself in his joy at theprettiness of de Saussure’s sharp observations. Spallanzaniand these naturalists of Geneva were bound by a mysteri-

55

ous cement—a realization that the work of finding factsand fitting facts together to build the high cathedral ofscience is greater than any single finder of facts or masonof facts. They were the first haters of war—the first citi-zens of the world, the first genuine internationalists.

Then Spallanzani was forced into one of the most devil-ishly ingenious researches of his life. He was forced intothis by his friendship for his pals in Geneva and by hishatred of another piece of scientific claptrap almost as badas the famous Vegetative Force. An Englishman namedEllis wrote a paper saying de Saussure’s observations aboutthe little animals splitting into two was all wrong. Ellisadmitted that the little beasts might occasionally breakinto two. “But that,” cried Ellis, “doesn’t mean they aremultiplying! It simply means,” he said, “that one littleanimal, swimming swiftly along in the water, bangs intoanother one amidships—and breaks him in half! That’s allthere is to de Saussure’s fine theory.

“What is more,” Ellis went on, “little animals are bornfrom each other just as larger beasts come from theirmothers. When I look carefully with my microscope, I canactually see young ones inside the old ones, and lookingstill more closely—you may not believe it—I can seegrandchildren inside these young ones.”

“Rot!” thought Spallanzani. All this stuff smelled veryfishy to him, but how to show it wasn’t true, and how toshow that animalcules multiplied by’breaking in two?

He was first of all a hard scientist, and he knew that itwas one thing to say Ellis was feeble-minded, but quiteanother to prove that the little animals didn’t bump intoeach 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 meditated, “is to get one little beast off by itself,away from every other one where nothing whatever can

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bump into it—and then just sit and watch through themicroscope to see if it breaks into two.” That was thesimple and the only way to do it, no doubt, but how toget one of these infernally tiny creatures away from hisswarms of companions? You can separate one puppy froma litter, or even a little minnow from its myriads of broth-ers and sisters. But you can’t reach in with your handsand take one animalcule by the tail—curse it—it is a mil-lion times too small for that.

Then this Spallanzani, this fellow who reveled in gaudycelebrations and vast enthusiastic lecturings, this hero ofthe crowd, this magnifico, crawled away from all his tri-umphs and pleasures to do one of the cleverest and mostmarvelously ingenious pieces of patient work in his hecticlife. He did no less a thing than to invent a sure methodof getting one animalcule—a few twenty-five thousandthsof an inch long—a living animalcule, off by itself.

He went to his laboratory and carefully put a drop ofseed soup swarming with animalcules on a clean piece ofcrystal glass. Then with a clean hair-fine tube he put adrop of pure distilled water—that had not a single littleanimal in it—on the same glass, close to the drop thatswarmed with microbes. ^

“Now I shall trap one,” he muttered, as he trained hislens on the drop that held the little animals. He took afine clean needle, he stuck it carefully into the drop ofmicrobe soup—and then made a little canal with it acrossto the empty water drop. Quickly he turned his lens ontothe passageway between the two drops, and grunted satis-faction as he saw the wriggling cavorting little creaturesbegin to drift through this little canal. He grabbed for a

little camePs-hair brush “There! there’s one of the wee

ones—just one, in the water drop!” Deftly he flicked thelittle brush across the small canal, wiping it out, so cut-

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ting off the chance of any other wee beast getting intothe water drop to join its lonely little comrade.

“God!” he cried. “I’ve done it—no one’s ever done thisbefore—I’ve got one animalcule all by himself; now noth-ing can bump him, now we’ll see if he’ll turn into twonew ones!” His lens hardly quivered as he sat with tenseneck and hands and arms, back bent, eye squintingthrough the glass at the drop with its single inhabitant.“How tiny he is,” he thought—“he is like a lone fish inthe spacious abysses of the sea.”

Then a strange sight startled him, not less dramatic forits unbelievable littleness. The beast—it was shaped like asmall rod—began to get thinner and thinner in the mid-dle. At last the two parts of it were held together by thethickness of a spider web thread, and the two thick halvesbegan to wriggle desperately—and suddenly they jerkedapart. There they were, two perfectly formed, gently glid-ing little beasts, where there had been one before. Theywere a little shorter but otherwise they couldn’t be toldfrom their parent. Then, what was more marvelous tosee, these two children of the first one in a score of min-uses split up again—and now there were four where therehad been one!

Spallanzani did this ingenious trick a dozen times andgot the same result and saw the same thing; and then hedescended on the unlucky Ellis like a ton of brick andflattened into permanent obscurity Ellis and his fine yarnabout the children and the grandchildren inside the littleanimals. Spallanzani was sniffish, he condescended, he ad-vised, he told Ellis to go back to school and learn his a bc’s of microbe hunting. He hinted that Ellis wouldn’thave made his mistake if he’d read the fine paper of deSaussure carefully, instead of inventing preposterous thco-

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ries that only cluttered up the hard job of getting genuinenew facts from a stingy Nature.

A scientist, a really original investigator of nature, irlike a writer or a painter or a musician. He is part artist,part cool searcher. Spallanzani told himself stories, he con-ceived himself the hero of a new epic exploration, he com-pared himself—in his writings even—to Columbus andVespucci. He told of that mysterious world of microbes asa new universe, and thought of himself as a daring ex-plorer making first groping expeditions along its bounda-ries only. He said nothing about the possible deadliness ofthe little animals—he didn’t like to engage, in print, inwild speculations—but his genius whispered to him thatthe fantastic creatures of this new world were of some surebut yet unknown importance to their big brothers, thehuman species. . . .

VII

Early in the year 1799, as Napoleon started thoroughlysmashing an old world to pieces, and iust as Beethovenwas knocking at the door of the nineteenth century withthe first of his mighty symphonies, war-cries of that de-fiant spirit of which Spallanzani was one of the chieforiginators—in the year 1799, I say, the great microbehunter was struck with apoplexy. Three days later he waspoking his energetic and irrepressible head above the bed-clothes, reciting Tasso and Homer to the amusement anddelight of those friends who had come to watch him die.But though he refused to admit it, as one of his biog-raphers says, it was his Canto di Cigno, his swan song, forin a few days he was dead.

Great Egyptian kings kept their names alive for poster-ity by having the court undertaker embalm them into ex-

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pensive and gorgeous mummies. The Greeks and Romanshad their likenesses wrought into dignified statues. Paint-ings exist of a hundred other distinguished men. What isleft for us to see of the marvelous Spallanzani?

In Pavia there is a modest little bust of him and in themuseum near by, if you are interested, you may see—hisbladder. What better epitaph could there be for SpaJlanzani? What relic could more perfectly suggest the wholeof his passion to find truth, that passion which stopped atnothing, which deepised conventions, which laughed athardship, which ignored bad taste and the feeble prettyfitness of things?

He knew his bladder was diseased. “Well, have it outafter I’m dead,” you can hear him whisper as he lay dy-ing. “Maybe you’ll find an astonishing new fart abnu*diseased bladders.” That was the spirit of SpallanzaniThis was the very soul of that cynical, sniffingly curiouscoldly reasoning century of his—the century that discovered few practical things—but the same century that builtthe high clean house for Faraday and Pasteur, for Arrhe-nius and Emil Fischer and Ernest Rutherford to work ia

chapter inPASTEUR

Microbes Are a Menace!

In 1831, thirty-two years after the magnificent Spallanzanidied, microbe hunting had come to a standstill once more.The sub-visible animals were despised and forgotten whileother sciences were making great leaps ahead; clumsy hor-ribly coughing locomotives were scaring the horses of Eu*

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rope and America; the telegraph was getting ready to beinvented. Marvelous microscopes were being devised, butno man had come to squint through these machines—noman had come to prove to the world that miserable littleanimals could do useful work which no complicatedsteam engine could attempt; there was no hint of thesomber fact that these wretched microbes could kill theirmillions of human beings mysteriously and silently, thatthey were much more efficient murderers than the guillo-tine or the cannon of Waterloo.

On a day in October in 1831, a nine-year-old boy ranfrightened away from the edge of a crowd that blockedthe door of the blacksmith shop of a village in the moun-tains of eastern France. Above the awed excited whispersof the people at the door this boy had heard the crackling“s-s-s-s-z” of a white hot iron on human flesh, and thisterrifying sizzling had been followed by a groan of pain.The victim was the farmer Nicole. He had just beenmangled by a mad wolf that charged howling, jaws drip-ping poison foam, through the streets of the village. Theboy who ran away was Louis Pasteur, son of a tanner ofArbois and great-grandson of a serf of the Count ofUdressier.

Days and weeks passed and eight victims of the madwolf died in the choking throat-parched agonies of hydro-phobia. Their screams rang in the ears of this timid—some called him stupid—boy; and the iron that hadseared the farmer’s wound burned a deep scar in hismemory.

“What makes a wolf or a dog mad, father—why dopeople die when mad dogs bite them?” asked Louis. Hisfather the tanner was an old sergeant of the armies ofNapoleon. He had seen ten thousand men die from bul-lets, but he had no notion of why people die from disease.

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‘Perhaps a devil got into the wolf, and if God wills youare to die, you will die, there is no help for it,” you canhear the pious tanner answer. That answer was as goodas any answer from the wisest scientist or the most expen-sive doctor in the world. In 1831 no one knew whatcaused people to die from mad dog bites—the cause of alldisease was completely unknown and mysterious.

I am not going to try to make believe that this terribleevent made the nine-year-old Louis Pasteur determine tofind out the cause and cure of hydrophobia some day—that would be very romantic—but it wouldn’t be true. Itis true though that he was more scared by it, haunted byit for a longer time, brooded over it more, that he smelledthe burned flesh and heard the screams a hundred timesmore vividly than an ordinary boy would—in short, hewas of the stuff of which artists are made; and it was thisstuff in him, as much as his science, that helped him todrag microbes out of that obscurity into which they hadpassed once more, after the gorgeous Spallanzani died. In-deed, for the first twenty years of his life he showed nosigns at all of becoming a great searcher. This Louis Pas-teur was only a plodding, careful boy whom nobody no-ticed particularly. He spent his playtime painting picturesof the river that ran by the tannery, and his sisters posedfor him until their necks grew stiff and their backs achedgrievously: he painted curiously harsh unflattering picturesof his mother—they didn’t make her look pretty, butthey looked like his mother. . . .

Meanwhile it seemed perfectly certain that the little ani-mals were going to be put permanently on the shelf alongwith the dodo and other forgotten beasts. The SwedeLinnaeus, most enthusiastic pigeonholer, who toiled atputting all living things in a neat vast card catalogue,

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threw up his hands at the very idea of studying the weebeasts. “They are too small, too confused, no one willever know anything exact about them, we will simply putthem in the class of Chaos!” said Linnseus. They wereonly defended by the famous round-faced German Ehren-berg who had immense quarrels—in moments when hewasn’t crossing oceans or receiving medals—futile quarrelsabout whether the little animals had stomachs, strangearguments about whether they were really complete littleanimals or only parts of larger animals; or whether per-chance they might be little vegetables instead of little ani-mals.

Pasteur kept plugging at his books though, and it waiwhile he was still at the little college of Arbois that thefirst of his masterful traits began to stick out—traits goodand bad, that made him one of the strangest mixtures ofcontradictions that ever lived. He was the youngest boyat the college, but he wanted to be a monitor; he had afiery ambition to teach other boys, particularly to runother boys. He became a monitor. Before he was twentyhe had become a kind of assistant teacher in the collegeof Bezan^on, and here he worked like the devil and in-sisted that everybody else work as hard as he worked him-self; he preached in long inspirational letters to his poorsisters—who, God bless them, were already trying theirbest

“To will is a great thing, dear sisters,” he wrote, “forAction and Work usually follow Will, and almost alwaysWork is accompanied by Success. These three things,Work, Will, Success, fill human existence. Will opens thedoor to success both brilliant and happy; Work passesthese doors, and at the end of the journey Success comesto crown one’s efforts.”

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When he was seventy his sermons had lost their capitalletters, but they were exactly the same kind of simpleearnest sermons.

His father sent him up to Paris to the Normal Schooland there he resolved to do great things, but he was car-ried away by a homesickness for the smell of the tanneryyard and he came back tc Arbois abandoning his highambition. ... In another year he was back at the sameschool in Paris and this time he stuck at it; and then oneday he passed in a tear-stained trance out of the lectureroom of the chemist Dumas. “What a science is chemis-try,” he muttered, “and how marvelous is the popularityand glory of Dumas.” He knew then that he was goingto be a great chemist too; the misty gray streets of theLatin Quarter dissolved into a confused and frivolousworld that chemistry alone could save. He had left offhis painting but he was still the artist.

Presently he began to make his first stumbling independ-ent researches with stinking bottles and rows of tubesfilled with gorgeous colored fluids. His good friend Chap-puis, a mere student of philosophy, had to listen for hoursto Pasteur’s lectures on the crystals of tartaric acid, andPasteur told Chappuis: “It is sad that you are not a chem-ist too.” He would have made all students chemists justas forty years later he tried to turn all doctors into mi-crobe hunters.

Just then, as Pasteur was bending his snub nose andbroad forehead over confused piles of crystals, the sub-visi-ble living microbes were beginning to come back into seri-ous notice, they were beginning to be thought of as im-portant serious fellow creatures, just as useful as horses orelephants, by two lonely searchers, one in France and one .in Germany. A modest but original Frenchman, Cagniard ^de la Tour, in 1837 poked round in beer vats of breweries.

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He dredged up a few foamy drops from such a vat andlooked at them through a microscope and noticed that thetiny globules of the yeasts he found in them sprouted budsfrom their sides, buds like seeds sprouting. “They are alivethen, these yeasts, they multiply like other creatures,” hecried. His further searchings made him see that no brewof hops and barley ever changed into beer without thepresence of the yeasts, living growing yeasts. “It must betheir life that changes barley into alcohol,” he meditated,and he wrote a short clear paper about it. The world re-fused to get excited about this fine work of the wee yeasts—Cagniard was no propagandist, he had no press agentto offset his own modesty.

In the same year in Germany Doctor Schwann pub-lished a short paper in long sentences, and these muddyphrases told a bored public the exciting news that meatonly becomes putrid when sub-visible animals get into it.“Boil meat thoroughly and put it in a clean bottle andlead air into it that has passed through red-hot pipes—themeat will remain perfectly fresh for months. But in a dayor two after you remove the stopper and let in ordinaryair, with its little animals, the meat will begin to smelldreadfully; it will teem with wriggling, cavorting crea-tures a thousand times smaller than a pinhead—it is thesebeasts that make meat go bad.”

How Leeuwenhoek would have opened his large eyes atthis! Spallanzani would have dismissed his congregationand rushed from his masses to his laboratory; but Europehardly looked up from its newspapers, and young Pasteurwas getting ready to make his own first great chemicaldiscovery.

When he was twenty-six years old he made it. Afterlong peerings at heaps of tiny crystals he discovered thatthere are four distinct kinds of tartaric acid instead of

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two; that there are a variety of strange compounds in na-ture that are exactly alike—excepting that they are mirror-images of each other. When he stretched his arms andstraightened up his lame back and realized what he haddone, he rushed out of his dirty dark little laboratory intothe hall, threw his arms around a young physics assistant—he hardly knew him—and took him out under thethick shade of the Gardens of the Luxembourg. There hepoured mouthfuls of triumphant explanation at him—hemust tell some one. He wanted to tell the world!

In a month he was praised by gray-haired chemists andbecame the companion of learned men three times hisage. He was made professor at Strasbourg and in the offmoments of researches he determined to marry the daugh-ter of the dean. He didn’t know if she cared for him buthe sat down and wrote her a letter that he knew mustmake her love him:

“There is nothing in me to attract a young girl’s fancy,”he wrote, “but my recollections tell me that those whohave known me very well have loved me very much.”

So she married him and became one of the most fa-mous and long-suffering and in many ways one of thehappiest wives in history—and this story will have moreto tell about her.

Now the head of a house, Pasteur threw himself morefuriously into his work; forgetting the duties and chival-ries of a bridegroom, he turned his nights into days. “Iam on the verge of mysteries,” he wrote, “and the veil isgetting thinner and thinner. The nights seem to me toolong. I am often scolded by Madame Pasteur, but I tellher I shall lead her to fame.” He continued his work on

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crystals; he ran into blind alleys, he did strange and foolish and impossible experiments, the kind a crazy manmight devise—and the kind that turn a crazy man into agenius when they come off. He tried to change the chem-istry of living things by putting them between huge mag-nets. He devised weird clockworks that swung plantsback and forward, hoping so to change the mysteriousmolecules that formed these plants into mirror images ofthemselves. . . . He tried to imitate God: he tried tochange species!

Madame Pasteur waited up nights for him and mar-veled at him and believed in him, and she wrote to hisfather: “You know that the experiments he is undertakingthis year will give us, if they succeed, a Newton or a Gali-leo!” It is not clear whether good Madame Pasteurformed this so high opinion of her young husband by her-self. ... At any rate, truth, that will o’ the wisp, failedhim this time—his experiments didn’t come off.

Then Pasteur was made Professor and Dean of the Fac-ulty of Sciences in Lille and there he settled down in theStreet of the Flowers, and it was here that he ran, orrather stumbled for the first time, upon microbes; it wasin this good solid town of distillers and sugar-beet raisersand farm implement dealers that he began his great cam-paign, part science, part drama and romance, part religionand politics, to put microbes on the map. It was fromthis not too interesting middle sized city—never noted forlearning—that he splashed up a great wave of excitementabout microbes that rocked the boat of science for thirtyyears. He showed the world how important microbeswere to it, and in doing this he made enemies and wor-shipers; his name filled the front pages of newspapers andhe received challenges to duels; the public made vast jokes

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about his precious microbes while his discoveries were sav-ing the lives of countless women in childbirth. In short itwas here he hopped off in his flight to immortality.

When he left Strasbourg truth was tricking him and hewas confused. He came to Lille and fairly stumbled onto the road to lame—by offering help to a beet-sugar dis-tiller.

When Pasteur settled in Lille he was told by the au-thorities that highbrow science was all right—

“But what wc want, what this enterprising city of Lillewants most of all, professor,” you can hear the Committeeof business men telling him, “is a close cooperation be-tween your science and our industries. What we want toknow is—does science pay? Raise our sugar yield fromour beets and give us a bigger alcohol output, and we’llsee you and your laboratory arc taken care of.”

Pasteur listened politely and then proceeded to showthem the stuff he was made of. He was much more thana man of science! Think of a committee of business menasking Isaac Newton to show them how his laws of mo-tion were going to help their iron works! That shythinker would have thrown up his hands and set himselfto studying the meaning of the prophecies of the Book ofDaniel at once. Faraday would have gone back to his firstjob as a bookbinder’s apprentice. But Pasteur was noshrinking flower. A child of the nineteenth century, heunderstood that science had to earn its bread and butter,and he started to make himself popular with everybodyby giving thrilling lectures to the townspeople on science;

“Where in your families will you find a young manwhose curiosity and interest will not immediately beawakened when you put into his hands a potato, andwhen with that potato he may produce sugar, and withthat sugar alcohol, and with that alcohol ether and vine-

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gar?” he shouted enthusiastically one evening to an audi-ence of prosperous manufacturers and their wives. Thenone day Mr. Bigo, a distiller of alcohol from sugar beets,came to his laboratory in distress. “We’re having troublewith our fermentations, Professor,” he complained; “we’relosing thousands of francs every day. I wonder if youcould come over to the factory and help us out?” said thegood Bigo.

Bigo’s son was a student in the science course and Pas*teur hastened to oblige. He went to the distillery andsniffed at the vats that were sick, that wouldn’t make al-cohol; he fished up some samples of the grayish slimymess and put them in bottles to take to his laboratory—and he didn’t fail to take some of the beet pulp from thehealthy foamy vats where good amounts of alcohol werebeing made. Pasteur had no idea he could help Bigo, heknew nothing of how sugar ferments into alcohol—indeed,no chemist in the world knew anything about it. He gotback to his laboratory, scratched his head, and decided toexamine the stuff from the healthy vats first. He putsome of this stuff—a drop of it—before his microscope,maybe with an aimless idea of looking for crystals, and hefound this drop was full of tiny globules, much smallerthan any crystal, and these little globes were yellowish incolor, and their insides were full of a swarm of curiousdancing specks.

“What can these things be,” he muttered. Then sud-denly he remembered—

“Of course, I should have known—these are the yeastsyou find in all stews that have sugar which is fermentinginto alcohol!”

He looked again and saw the wee spheres alone; hesaw some in bunches, others in chains, and then to hi?wonder he came on some with queer buds sprouting from

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their nicies—they looked like sprouts on infinitely tinyseeds.

“Cagniard de la Tour is right. These yeasts are alive. Itmust be the yeasts that change beet sugar into alcohol!”he cried. “But that doesn’t help Mr. Bigo—what on earthcan be the matter with the stuff in the sick vats?” Hegrabbed for the bottle that held the stuff from the sickvat, he sniffed at it, he peered at it with a little magnify-ing glass, he tasted it, he dipped little strips of blue paperin it and watched them turn red. . . . Then he put adrop from it before his microscope and looked. . . .

“But there are no yeasts in this one; where are theyeasts? There is nothing here but a mass of confusedstuff—what is it, what does this mean?” He took thebottle up again and brooded over it with an eye that sawnothing—till at last a different, a strange look of the juiceforced its way up into his wool-gathering thoughts. “Hereare little gray specks sticking 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 yeastsand alcohol. What can that mean?” he pondered. Thenhe fished down into the bottle and got a speck, withsome trouble, into a drop of pure water; he put it beforehis microscope. . . .

His moment had come.

No yeast globes here, no, but something different, some-thing strange he had never seen before, great tangleddancing masses of tiny rod-like things, some of themalone, some drifting along like strings of boats, all ofthem shimmying with a weird incessant vibration. Hehardly dared to guess at their size—they were muchsmaller 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

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his stumpy legs hurried him back to the beet factory. Huglasses awry on his nearsighted eyes, he leaned over anddredged up other samples from other sick vats—he forgotall about Bigo and thought nothing of helping Bigo;Bigo didn’t exist; nothing in the world existed but hissniffing curious self and these dancing strange rods. Inevery one of the grayish specks he found millions ofthem. . . . Feverishly at night with Madame Pasteur wait-ing up for him and at last going to bed without him, heset up apparatus that made his laboratory look like an al-chemist’s den. He found that the rod-swarming juicefrom the sick vats always contained the acid of sour milk—and no alcohol. Suddenly a thought flooded through hisbrain: “Those little rods in the juice of the sick vats arealive, and it is they that make the acid of sour milk—therods fight with the yeasts perhaps, and get the upperhand. They are the ferment of the sour-milk-acid, just asthe yeasts must be the ferment of the alcohol!” Herushed up to tell the patient Madame Pasteur about it,the only half-understanding Madame Pasteur who knewnothing of fermentations, the Madame Pasteur whohelped him so by believing always in his wild enthusi-asms. . . .

It was only a guess but there was something inside himthat whispered to him that it was surely true. There wasnothing uncanny about the rightness of his guess; Pasteurmade thousands of guesses about the thousand strangeevents of nature that met his shortsighted peerings. Manyof these guesses were wrong—but when he did hit on aright one, how he did test it and prove it and sniff alongafter it and chase it and throw himself on it and bring itto earth! So it was now, when he was sure he had solvedthe ten-thousand-year-old mystery of fermentation.

His head buzzed with a hundred confused plans to see

V

if he was really right, but he never neglected the businessmen and their troubles, or the authorities or the farmersor his students. He turned part of his laboratory into amanure testing station, he hurried to Paris and tried toget himself elected to the Academy of Sciences—and failed—and he took his classes on educational trips to breweriesin Valenciennes and foundries in Belgium. In the middleof this he felt sure, one day, that he had a way to provethat the little rods were alive, that in spite of their miser-able littleness they did giant’s work, the work no giantcould do—of changing sugar into lactic acid.

“I can’t study these rods that I think are alive in thismixed-up mess of the juice of the beet-pulp from thevats,” Pasteur pondered. “I shall have to invent somekind of clear soup for them so that I can see what goeson—I’ll have to invent this special food for them andthen see if they multiply, if they have young, if a thou-sand of the small dancing beings appears where there wasonly one at first.” He tried putting some of the grayishspecks from the sick vats into pure sugar water. They re-fused to grow in it. “The rods need a richer food,” hemeditated, and after many failures he devised a strangesoup; he took some dried yeast and boiled it in pure wa-ter and strained it so that it was perfectly clear, he addedan exact amount of sugar and a little carbonate of chalkto keep the soup from being acid. Then on the point of afine needle he fished up one of the gray specks from somejuice of a sick fermentation. Carefully he sowed thisspeck in his new clear soup—and put the bottle in an in-cubating oven—and waited, waited anxious and nervous;it is this business of experiments not coming off at oncethat is always the cprse of microbe hunting.

He waited and signed some vouchers and lectured tostudents and came back to peer into his incubator at his

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precious bottle and advised farmers about their crops andfertilizers and bolted absent-minded meals and peeredonce more at his tubes—and waited. He went to bedwithout knowing what was happening in his bottle—it ishard to sleep when you do not know such things. . . •

All the next day it was the same, but toward eveningwhen his legs began to be heavy with failure once more,he muttered: “There is no clear broth that will let me seethese beastly rods growing--but I’ll just look oncemore ”

He held the bottle up to the solitary gaslight thatpainted grotesque giant shadows of the apparatus on thelaboratory walls. “Sure enough, there’s somediing chang-ing here,” he whispered; “there are rows of little bubblescoming up from some of the gray specks I sowed in thebottle yesterday—there are many new gray specks—all ofthem are sprouting bubbles!” Then he became deaf anddumb and blind to the world of men; he stayed en-tranced before his little incubator; hours floated by, hoursthat might have been seconds for him. He took up hisbottle caressingly; he shook it gently before the light—little spirals of gray murky cloud curled up from the bot-tom of the flask and from these spirals came big bubblesof 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 withshimmying millions of the tiny rods. “They multiply IThey are alive!” he whispered to himself, then shouted:“Yes, I’ll be up in a little while!” to Madame Pasteurwho had called down begging him to come up for din-ner, to come for a little rest. For hours he did not come.

Time and again in the days that followed he did thesame experiment, putting a tiny drop from a flask thatswarmed with rods into a fresh clear flask of yeast soup

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that had none at all—and every time the rods appeared inbillions and each time they made new quantities of theacid of sour milk. Then Pasteur burst out—he was not apatient man—to tell the world. He told Mr. Bigo it wasthe little rods that made his fermentations sick: “Keep thelittle rods out of your vats and you’ll always get alcohol,Mr. Bigo.” He told his classes about his great discoverythat such infinitely tiny beasts could make acid of sourmilk from sugar—a thing no mere man had ever done orcould do. He wrote the news to his old Professor Dumasand to all his friends and he read papers about it to theLille Scientific Society and sent a learned treatise to theAcademy of Sciences in Paris. It is not clear whether Mr.Bigo found it possible to keep the little rods out of hisvats—for they were like bad weeds that get into gardens.But to Pasteur that didn’t matter so much. Here was theone important fact:

It is living things, sub-visible living beings, that are thereal cause of fermentation si

Innocently he told every one that his discovery was re-markable—he was too much of a child to be modest—andfrom now on and for years these little ferments filled hissky; he ate and slept and dreamed and loved—after hisabsent-minded fashion—with his ferments by him. Theywere his life. *

He worked alone for he had no assistant, not even aboy to wash his bottles for him; how then, you will ask,did he find time to cram his days with such a bewilder-ing jumble of events? Partly because he was an energeticman, and partly it was thanks to Madame Pasteur, whoin the words of Roux, “loved him even to the point ofunderstanding his work.” On those evenings when shewasn’t waiting up lonely for him—when she had finishedputting to bed those children whose absent-minded father

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he was—this brave lady sat primly on a straight-backedchair at a little table and wrote scientific papers at his dic-tation. Again, while he was below brooding over histubes and bottles she would translate the cramped scrawlsof his notebooks into a clear beautiful handwriting. Pasteurwas her life and since Pasteur thought only of work herown life melted more and more into his work. . . .

hi

Then one day in the midst of all this—they were justnicely settled in Lille—he came to her and said: “We aregoing to Paris, I have just been made Administrator andDirector of Scientific Studies in the Normal School. Thisis my great chance.”

They moved there, and Pasteur found there was abso-lutely no place for him to work in; there were a fewdirty laboratories for the students but none for the profes-sors; what was worse, the Minister of Instruction toldhim there was not one cent in the budget for those bot-tles and ovens and microscopes without which he couldnot live. But Pasteur snooped round in every cranny ofthe dirty old building and at last climbed tricky stairs toa tiny room where rats played, to an attic under the roof.He chased the rats out and proclaimed this den his labor-atory; he got money—in some mysterious way that is stillnot clear—for his microscopes and tubes and flasks. Theworld must know how important ferments are in its life.The world soon knew!

His experiment with the little rods that made the acidof sour milk convinced him—why, no one can tell—thatother kinds of small beings did a thousand other giganticand useful and perhaps dangerous things in the world.“It is those yeasts that my microscope showed me in thehealthy beet vats, it is those yeasts that turn sugar into al-

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cohol—it is undoubtedly yeasts chat make heer from bar-ley and it is certainly yeasts that ferment grapes intowine—I haven’t proved it yet, but I know it.” Energet-ically he wiped his fogged spectacles and cheerfully heclimbed to his attic. Experiments would tell him; hemust make experiments; he must prove to himself he wasright—more especially he must prove to the world he wasright. But the world of science was against him.

Liebig, the great German, the prince of chemists, thepope of chemistry, was opposed to his idea. “So Liebigsays yeasts have nothing to do with the turning of sugarinto alcohol—so he claims that you have to have albumenthere, and that it is just the albumen breaking down thatcarries the sugar along down with it, into alcohol.” Hewould show this Liebig! Then a trick to beat Liebigflashed into his head, a crafty trick, a simple clear experi-ment that would smash Liebig and all other pooh-bahs ofchemistry who scorned the important work that his pre-cious microscopic creatures might do.

“What I have to do is to grow yeasts in a soup that hasno albumen in it at all. If yeasts will turn sugar into alco-hol in such a soup—then Liebig and his theories are fin-ished.” Defiance was in every fiber of him. This businesswas turning from an affair of cold science into a purelypersonal matter. But it was one thing to have this blightidea and quite another to find an albumenless food foryeasts—yeasts were squeamish in their tastes, confoundthem—and he fussed around his drafty attic and was forweeks an exasperated, a very grumpy Pasteur. Until onemorning a happy accident cleared the road for him.

He had by chance put some salt of ammonia into an al-bumen soup in which he grew the yeasts for his experi-ments. “What’s this,” he meditated. “The ammonia saltkeeps disappearing as my yeasts bud and multiply. What

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does this mean?” He thought, he fumbled— “Wait! Theyeasts use up the ammonia salt, they will grow withoutthe albumen!” He slammed shut the door of his atticroom, he must be alone while he worked—he loved to bealone as he worked just as he greatly enjoyed spouting hisglorious results to worshipful, brilliant audiences. He tookclean flasks and poured distilled water into them, andcarefully weighed out pure sugar and slid it into this wa-ter, and then put in his ammonia salt—it was the tartrateof ammonia that he used. He reached for a bottle thatswarmed with young budding yeasts; with care he fishedout a yellowish flake of them and dropped it into his newalbumenlcss soup, tie put the bottle in his incubatingoven. Would they grow?

That night he turned over and over in his bed. Hewhispered his hopes and fears to Madame Pasteur—shecouldn’t advise him but she comforted him. She under-stood everything but couldn’t explain away his worries.She was his perfect assistant. . . .

He was back in his attic next morning not knowinghow he had got up the stairs, not remembering his break-fast—he might have floated from his bed directly to therickety dusty incubator that held his flask—that fatal flask.He opened the bottle and put a tiny cloudy drop from itbetween two thin bits of glass and slid the specimen un-der the lens of his microscope—and knew the world washis.

“Here they are,” he cried, “lovely budding growingyoung yeasts, hundreds of thousands of them—yes, andhere are some of the old ones, the parent yeasts I sowed inthe bottle yesterday.” He wanted to rush out and tellsome one, but he held himself—he must find out some-thing more—he got some of the soup from the fatal bot-tle into a retort, to find out whether his budding beings

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had made alcohol. “Liebig is wrong—albumen isn’t neces-sary—it is yeasts, the growth o£ yeasts that fermentssugar.” And he watched trickling tears of alcohol rundown the neck of the retort. He spent the next weeks indoing the experiment over and over, to be sure that theyeasts would keep on living, to be certain that they wouldkeep on making alcohol. He transferred them monoto-nously, from one bottle to another—he put them throughcountless flasks of this same simple soup of ammonia saltand sugar in water and always the yeasts budded lustilyand filled the bottles with a foamy collar of carbonic acidgas. Always they made alcohol! This checking-up of hisdiscoveries was dull work. There was not the excitement,the sleepless waiting for a result he hoped for passionatelyor 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 fedthem and loved them and was proud of their miraculouswork of turning great quantities of sugar into alcohol. Heruined his health watching them and he violated sacredcustoms of all good middle-class Frenchmen. He writesof how he sat down before his lens at seven in the eve-ning—and this is the dinner hour of France!—he satdown to watch and see if he could spy on his yeasts inthe act of budding. “And from that time,” he writes, “Idid not take my eye from the microscope.” It was halfpast nine before he was satisfied that he had seen thembud. He made vast crazy tests that lasted from June untilSeptember to find out how long yeasts would keep attheir work of turning sugar into alcohol, and at the endhe cried: “Give your yeasts enough sugar, and they willnot stop working for three months, or even more!”

Then for a moment the searcher in him changed into ashowman, an exhibitor of stupendous surprises, a mission*

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ary in the cause of microbes. The world must know andthe people of the world must gasp at this astoundingnews that millions of gallons of wine in France andboundless oceans of beer in Germany are not made bymen at all but by incessantly toiling armies of creaturesten-billion times smaller than a wee baby!

He read papers about this and gave speeches and threwhis proofs insolently at the great Liebig’s head—and in alittle while a storm was up in the little Republic of Sci-ence on the left bank of the Seine in Paris. His old Pro-fessors beamed pride on him and the Academy of Sci-ences, which had refused to elect him a member, nowgave him the Prize of Physiology, and the magnificentClaude Bernard—whom Frenchmen called Physiology it-self—praised him in stately sentences. The next night,Dumas, his old professor—whose brilliant lectures hadmade him cry when he was a green boy in Paris—threwbouquets at Pasteur in a public speech that would havemade another man than Pasteur bow his head and blushand protest. Pasteur did not blush—he was perfectly surethat Dumas was right. Instead he sat down proudly andwrote to his father:

“Mr. Dumas, after praising the so great penetration Ihad given proof of . . . added: 'The Academy, sir, re-warded you a jew days ago for other profound researches;your audience this evening will applaud you as one of thtmost distinguished professors we possess/ All that I haveunderlined 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 hurrahingthere was some quiet hissing. Opponents began to rise onall sides. Pasteur made these enemies not entirely becausehis discoveries stepped on the toes of old theories and be-liefs* No, his bristling curious impudent air of challenge

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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-be-licve-it-at-once” between the lines of all of his writings andspeeches. He loved to fight with words, he had a cockyeagerness to get into an argument with every one aboutanything. He would have sputtered indignantly at aninnocently intended comment on his grammar or hispunctuation. Look at portraits of him taken at thistime—it was i860—read his researches, and you will finda fighting sureness of his perpetual rightness in every hairof his eyebrow and even in the technical terms and chem-ical formulas of his famous scientific papers.

Many people objected to this scornful cockiness—butsome good men of science had better reasons for disagree-ing with him—his experiments were brilliant, they werestartling, but his experiments stopped short of being com-pletely proved. They had loopholes. Every now and thenwhen he set out confidently with some of his gray specksof ferment to make the acid of sour milk, he would findto his disgust a nasty smell of rancid butter wafting upfrom his bottles. There would be no little rods in theflask—alas—and none of the sour-milk-acid that he had setout to get. These occasional failures, the absence of sure-fire in these tests gave ammunition to his enemies andbrought sleepless nights to Pasteur. But not for long! Itis not the least strange thing about him that it didn’tseem to matter to him that he never quite solved this con-fusing going wrong of his fermentations; he was a cun-ning man—instead of butting his head against the wall ofthis problem, he slipped around it and turned it to hisgreat fame and advantage.

Why this annoying rancid butter smell—why sometimesno sour-milk-acid? One morning, in one of his bottlesthat had gone bad, he noticed another kind of wee beasts

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swimming around among a few of the discouraged danc-ing rods which should have been there in great swarms.

“What are these beasts? They’re much bigger than therods—they don’t merely quiver and vibrate—they actuallyswim around like fish; they must be little animals.”

He watched them peevishly, he had an instinct they hadno business there. There were processions of them hookedtogether like barges on the River Seine, strings of clumsybarges that snaked along. Then there were lonely onesthat would perform a stately twirl now and again; some-times they would make a pirouette and balance—the nextmoment they would shiver at one end in a curious kindof shimmy. It was all very interesting, these variouspretty cavortings of these new beasts. But they had nobusiness there! He tried a hundred ways to keep themout, ways that would seem very clumsy to us now, butjust as he thought he had cleaned them out of all his bot-tles, back they popped. Then one day it flashed over himthat every time that his bottles of soup swarmed with thisgently moving larger sort of animal, these same bottles ofsoup had the strong nasty smell of rancid butter.

So he proved, after a fashion, that this new kind ofbeast was another kind of ferment, a ferment that madethe rancid-butter-acid from sugar; but he didn’t naildown his proof, because he couldn’t be sure, absolutely,that there was one kind and only one kind of beast presentin his bottles. While he was a little confused and uncer-tain about this, he turned his troubles once more to hisadvantage. He was peering, one day, at the rancid buttermicrobes swarming before his microscope. “There’s some-thing new here—in the middle of the drop they are lively,going every which way.” Gently, precisely, a little aim-lessly, he moved the specimen so that the edge of thedrop was under his lens. . . . “But here at the edge

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they’re not moving, they’re lying round stiff as pokers.”It was so with every specimen he looked at. “Air killsthem,” he cried, and was sure he had made a great dis-covery. A little while afterward he told the Academyproudly 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 discoveredthat these animals could live and play and move and dotheir work without any air whatever. Air even killedthem! “And this,” he cried, “is the first example of littleanimals living without air!”

Unfortunately it was the third example. Two hundredyears before old Leeuwenhoek had seen the same thingA hundred years later Spallanzani had been amazed tofind that microscopic beasts could live without breathing.

Very probably Pasteur didn’t know about these dis-coveries of the old trail blazers—I am sure he was not try-ing to steal their stuff—but as he went up in his excitedclimb toward glory and toward always increasing crowdsof new discoveries, he regarded less and less what hadbeen done before him and what went on around him.He re-discovered the curious fact that microbes make meatgo bad. He failed to give the first discoverer, Schwann,proper credit for it!

But this strange neglect to give credit for the goodwork of others must not be posted too strongly againsthim in the Book of St. Peter, because you can see hisfine imagination, that poet’s thought of his, making itsfirst attempts at showing that microbes are the real mur-derers of the human race. He dreams in this paper thatjust as there is putrid meat, so there are putrid diseases.He tells how he suffered in this work with meat gonebad; he tells about the bad smells—and how he hated badsmells!—that filled his little laboratory during these re-

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searches: “My researches on the iermentations have led menaturally roward these studies to which I have resolvedto devote myself without too much thought of their dan-ger or of the disgust which they inspire in me,” and thenhe told the 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 ennoblethe most disgusting work and only allow enlightened mento see the zeal which is needed to overcome obstacles.”

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So he prepared the stage for his dangerous experiments—years before he entered on them. He prepared a pub-lic stage-setting. His proposed heroism thrilled the calmmen of science that were his audience. As they returnedhome through the gray streets of the ancient Latin Quar-ter they could imagine Pasteur bidding them a farewellfull of emotion, they could see him marching with set lips—wanting to hold his nose but bravely not doing it—intothe midst of stinking pestilences where perilous microbeslay in wait for him. ... It is so that Pasteur provedhimself much more useful than Leeuwenhoek or Spallan-zani—he did excellent experiments, and then had a knacko< presenting them in a way to heat up the world aboutchem. Grave men of science grew excited. Simple peoplesaw clear visions of the yeasts that made the wine thatwas their staff of life and they were troubled at nights bythoughts of hovering invisible putrid microbes in theair. . . .

He did curious tests that waited three years to be com-pleted. He took flasks and filled them part way full withmilk or urine. He doused them in boiling water andsealed their slender necks shut in a blast flame—then for

8*

years he guarded them. At last he opened them, to showthat the urine and the milk were perfectly preserved, thatthe air above the fluid in the bottles still had almost allof its oxygen; no microbes, no destruction of the milk!He allowed germs to grow their silent swarms in otherflasks of urine and milk that he had left unboiled, andwhen he tested these for oxygen he found that the oxy-gen had been completely used up—the microbes had usedit to burn up, to destroy the stuff on which they fed.Then like a great bird Pasteur spread his wings of fancyand soared up to fearsome speculations—he imagined aweird world without microbes, a world whose air hadplenty of oxygen, but this oxygen would be of no use,alas, to destroy dead plants and animals, because there wereno microbes to do the oxidations. His hearers had night-mare glimpses of vast heaps of carcasses choking desertedlifeless streets—without microbes life would not be pos-sible!

Now Pasteur ran hard up against a question that wasbound to pop up and look him in the face sooner orlater. It was an old question. Adam had without doubtasked it of God, while he wondered where the ten thou-sand living beings of the garden of Eden came from. Itwas the question that had all thinkers by the ears for ahundred centuries, that had given Spallanzani so much ex-citing fun a hundred years before. It was the simple butabsolutely insoluble question: Where do microbes comefrom ?

“How is it,” Pasteur’s opponents asked him, “how is itdiat yeasts appear from nowhere every year of every cen-tury in every corner of the earth, to turn grape juice intowine? Where do the little animals come from, these lit-tle animals that turn milk sour in every can and butterrancid in every jar, from Greenland to Timbuctoo?”

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Like Spallanzani, Pasteur could not* believe that the mi-crobes rose from the dead stuff of the milk or butter.Surely microbes have to have parents! He was, you see, agood Catholic. It is true that he lived among the brainyskeptics on the left bank of the Seine in Paris, where Godis as popular as a Soviet would be in Wall Street, butthe doubts of his colleagues didn’t touch Pasteur. It wasbeginning to be the fashion of the doubters to believe inEvolution: the majestic poem that tells of life, starting asa formless stuff stirring in a steamy ooze of a million yearsago, unfolding through a stately procession of living be-ings until it gets to monkeys and at last—triumphantly—to men. There doesn’t have to be a God to start thatparade or to run it—it just happened, said the new philos-ophers with an air of science.

But Pasteur answered: “My philosophy is of the heartand not of the mind, and I give myself up, for instance,to those feelings about eternity that come naturally at thebedside of a cherished child drawing its last breath. Atthose supreme moments there is something in the depthsof our souls which tells us that the world may be morethan a mere combination of events due to a machine-likeequilibrium brought out of the chaos of the elements sim-ply through the gradual action of the forces of matter/5He was always a good Catholic.

Then Pasteur dropped philosophy and set to work. Hebelieved that his yeasts and rods and little animals camefrom the air—he imagined an air full of these invisiblethings. Other microbe hunters had shown there weregerms in the air, but Pasteur made elaborate machines toprove it all over again. He poked gun cotton into littleglass tubes, put a suction pump on one end of them andstuck the other end out of the window, sucked half theair of the garden through the cotton—and then gravelv

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tried to count the number ot living beings in this cottonHe invented clumsy machines for getting these microbe-loaded bits of cotton into yeast soup, to sec whether themicrobes would grow. He did the good old experimentof Spallanzani over; he got himself a round bottle andput some yeast soup in it, and scaled oil the neck of thebottle in the stuttering blast lamp flame, then boiled thesoup for a few minutes—and no microbes grew in thisbottle.

“But you have heated the air in your flask when youboiled the yeast soup—what yeast soup needs to generatelittle animals is natural air—you can’t put yeast soup to-gether with natural unheated air without its giving rise toyeasts or molds or torulas or vibrions or animalcules!”cried the believers in spontaneous generation, the evolu-tionists, the doubting botanists, cried all Godless men fromtheir libraries and their armchairs. They shouted, butmade no experiments.

Pasteur, in a muddle, tried to invent ways of gettingunheated air into a boiled yeast soup—and yet keep itfrom swarming with living sub-visible creatures. He fum-bled at getting a way to do this; he muddled—keepingall the time a brave face toward the princes and professorsand publicists that were now beginning to swarm towatch his miracles. The authorities had promoted himfrom his rat-infested attic to a little building of four orfive two-by-four rooms at the gate of the Normal School.It would not be considered good enough to house theguinea-pigs of the great Institutes of to-day, but it washere that Pasteur set out on his famous adventure toprove that there was nothing to the notion that microbescould arise without parents. It was an adventure that waspart good experiment, part unseemly scuffle—a scufflethat threatened at certain hilariously vulgar moments to

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be settled by a fist fight. He messed around, I say, andhis apparatus kept getting more and more complicated,and his experiments kept getting easier to object to andless clear, he began to replace his customary easy experi-ments that convinced with sledge-hammer force, by longdrools of words. He was stuck.

Then one day old Professor Balard walked into hisworkroom. Balard had started life as a druggist; he hadbeen an owlish original druggist who had amazed the sci-entific world by making the discovery of the element bro-mine, not in a fine laboratory, but on the prescriptioncounter in the back room of a drugstore. This had gothim fame and his job of professor of chemistry in Paris.Balard was not ambitious; he had no yearning to makeall the discoveries in the world—discovering bromine wasenough for one man’s lifetime—but Balard did like to nosearound to watch what went on in other laboratories.

“You say you’re stuck, you say you do not see how toget air and boiled yeast soup together without getting liv-ing creatures into the yeast soup, my friend?” you canhear the lazy Balard asking the then confused Pasteur.“Look here, you and I both believe there is no such thingas microbes rising in a yeast soup by themselves—we bothbelieve they fall in or creep in with the dust of the air,is it not so?”

“Yes,” answered Pasteur, “but ”

“Wait a minute!” interrupted Balard. “Why don’t youjust 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 ofyour round flasks, put the yeast soup into it, then softenthe glass of the flask neck in your blast lamp—and drav»

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the neck out and downward into a thin little tube—turnthis little tube down the way a swan bends his neck whenhe’s picking something 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 magnificent in-geniousness of this little experiment. “Why, then microbescan’t fall into the flask, because the dust they stick tocan’t very well fall upward—marvelous! I see it now!”

“Exactly,” smiled Balard. “Try it and find out if itworks—see you later,” and he left to continue his genialround of the laboratories.

Pasteur had bottle washers and assistants now, and heordered them to hurry and prepare the flasks. In a mo-ment the laboratory was buzzing with the stuttering car-shattering b-r-r-r-r-r of the enameler’s lamps; he fell towork savagely. He took flasks and put yeast soup intothem and then melted their necks and drew them outand curved them downward—into swan’s necks and pig-tails and Chinaman’s cues and a half-dozen fantasticshapes. Next he boiled the soup in them—that drove outall the air—but as the flasks cooled down new air camein—unheated air, perfectly clean air.

The flasks, ready, Pasteur crawled on his hands andknees, back and forth with a comical dignity on his handsand knees, carrying one flask at a time, through a lowcubby hole under the stairs to his incubating oven. Nextmorning he was first at the laboratory, and in a jiffy,battered notebook in his hand, if you had been there youwould have seen his rear elevation disappearing underneaththe stairway. Like a beagle to its rabbit Pasteur wasdrawn to this oven with its swan neck flasks. Family,love, breakfast, and the rest of a silly world no longerexisted for him.

Had you still been there a half hour later, you wouldhave seen him come crawling out, his eyes shining throughhis fogged glasses. He had a right to be happy, for everyone of the long twisty necked bottles in which the yeastsoup had been boiled was perfectly clear—there was not aliving creature in them. The next day they remained thesame and the next. There was no doubt now that Balard’sscheme had worked. There was no doubt that spontaneousgeneration was nonsense. “What a fine experiment is thisexperiment of mine—this proves that you can leave anykind of soup, after you’ve boiled it, you can leave it opento the ordinary air, and nothing will grow in it—so longas the air gets into it through a narrow twisty tube.”

Balard came back and smiled as Pasteur poured thenews of the experiment over him. “I thought it wouldwork—you see, when the air comes back in, as the flaskcools, the dusts and their germs start in through the nar-row neck—but they get caught on the moist walls of thelittle tube.”

“Yes, but how can we prove that?” puzzled Pasteur.

“Just take one of those flasks that has been in your ovenall these days, a flask where no living things have appeared,and shake that flask so that the soup sloshes over and backand forth into the swan’s neck part of it. Put it back in theoven, and next morning the soup will be cloudy with thickswarms of little beasts—children of the ones that werecaught in the neck.”

Pasteur tried it, and it was so! A little later at abrilliant meeting where the brains and wit and art ofParis fought to get in, Pasteur told of his swan neck flaskexperiment in rapturous words. “Never will the doctrineof Spontaneous Generation recover from the mortal blowthat this simple experiment has dealt it,” he shouted. If

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Balard was there you may be sure he applauded as en-thusiastically as the rest. A rare soul was Balard.

Then Pasteur invented an experiment that was—so faras one can tell from a careful search through the records—really his own. It was a grand experiment, a semi-pub-lic experiment, an experiment that meant rushing acrossFrance in trains, it was a test in which he had to slitheraround on glaciers. Once more his laboratory became ashambles of cluttered flasks and hurrying assistants andtinkling glassware and sputtering, bubbling pots of yeastsoup. Pasteur and his enthusiastic slaves—they were morelike fanatic monks than slaves—were getting ready hun-dreds of round bellied bottles. They filled each one ofthem part full of yeast soup and then, during manyhours that shot by like moments—such was their excite-ment—they doused each bottle for a few minutes in boil-ing water. And while the soup was boiling they drew theflask necks out in a spitting blue flame until they weresealed shut. Each one of this regiment of bottles heldboiled yeast soup—and a vacuum.

Armed with these dozens of flasks, and fussing aboutthem, Pasteur started on his travels. He went down firstinto the dank cellars of the Observatory of Paris, tharfamous Observatory where worked the great Lc Verrier,who had done the proud feat of prophesying the existenceof the planet Neptune. “Here the air is so still, so calm,’*said Pasteur to his boys, “that there will be hardly anydust in it, and almost no microbes.” Then, holding theflasks far away from their bodies, using forceps that hadbeen heated red hot in a flame, they cracked the necks often of the flasks in succession; as the neck came off eachone, there was a hissing “s-s-s-s” of air rushing in. At oncethey sealed the bottles shut again in the flickering flame ofan alcohol lamp. They did the same stunc in the yard of

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the observatory with another ten bottles, then hurriedback to the little laboratory to crawl under the stairs toput the bottles in the incubating oven.

A few days later Pasteur might have been seen squat-ting before his oven, handling his rows of flasks lovingly,laughing his triumph with one of those extremely rarelaughs of his—he only laughed when he found out hewas right. He put down tiny scrawls in his notebook,and then crawled out of his cubby-hole to tell his assist-ants: “Nine out of ten of the bottles we opened in thecellar of the Observatory are perfectly clear—not a singlegerm got into them. All the bottles we opened in theyard are cloudy—swarming with living creatures. It’s theair that sucks them into the yeast soup—it’s the dust ofthe air they come in with!”

He gathered Up the rest of the bottles and hurried tothe train—it was the time of the summer vacation whenother professors were resting—and he went to his oldhome in the Jura mountains and climbed the hill ofPoupct and opened twenty bottles there. He went toSwitzerland and perilously let the air hiss into twentyflasks on the slopes of Mont Blanc; and found, as he hadhoped, that the higher he went, the fewer were the flasksof yeast soup that became cloudy with swarms of mi-crobes. “That is as it ought to be,” he cried, “the higherand clearer the air, the less dust—and the fewer the mi-crobes that always stick to particles of the dust.” He cameback proudly to Paris and told the Academy—with proofsthat would astonish everybody!—that it was now sure thatair alone could never cause living things to rise in yeastsoup. “Here are germs, right beside them there are none,a little further on there are different ones . . . and herewhere the air is perfectly calm there are none at all,” hecried. Then once more he set a new stage for possible

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magnificent exploits s “I would have liked to have goneup in a balloon to open my bottles still higher up!” Buthe didn’t go up in that balloon, for his hearers were al-ready sufficiently astonished. Already they considered himto be more than a man of science; he became for them acomposer of epic searchings, a Ulysses of microbe hunters—the first adventurer of that heroic age to which you willsoon come in this story.

Many times Pasteur won his arguments by brilliant ex-periments that simply floored every one, but sometimeshis victories were due to the weakness or silliness of hisopponents, and again they were the result of—luck. Be-fore a society of chemists Pasteur had insulted the scien-tific ability of naturalists; he was astonished, he shouted,that naturalists didn’t stretch out a hand to the real wayof doing science—that is, to experiments. “I am of thepersuasion that that would put a new sap into theirscience,” he said. You can imagine how the naturalistsliked that kind of talk; particularly Mr. Pouchet, directorof the Museum of Rouen, did not like it and he was en-thusiastically joined in not liking it by Professor Joly andMr. Musset, famous naturalists of the College of Toulouse.Nothing could convince these enemies of Pasteur thatmicroscopic beasts did not come to life without parents.They were sure there was such a thing as life arisingspontaneously; they decided to beat Pasteur on his ownground at his own game.

Like Pasteur they filled up some flasks, but unlike himthey used a soup of hay instead of yeast, they made avacuum in their bottles and hastened to high Maladettain the Pyrenees, and they kept climbing until they hadgot up many feet higher than Pasteur had been on MontBlanc. Here, beaten upon by nasty breezes that howledout of the caverns of the glaciers and sneaked through

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the thick linings of their coats, they opened their flasks—Mr. Joly almost slid off the edge of the ledge and wasonly saved from a scientific martyrs death when a guidegrabbed him by the coat tail! Out of breath and chilledthrough and through they staggered back to a little tavernand put their flasks in an improvised incubating oven—and in a few days, to their joy, they found every one oftheir bottles swarming with little creatures. Pasteur waswrong!

Now the fight was on. Pasteur became publicly sar-castic about the experiments of Pouchct, Joly and Musset;he made criticisms that to-day we know are quibbles.Pouchct came back with the remark that Pasteur “hadpresented his own flasks as an ultimatum to science toastonish everybody.” Pasteur was furious, denouncedPouchet as a liar and bawled for a public apology. Itseemed, alas, as if the truth were going to be decided bythe spilling of blood, instead of by calm experiment. ThenPouchet and Joly and Musset challenged Pasteur to apublic experiment before the Academy of Sciences, andthey said that if one single flask would fail to grow mi-crobes after it had been opened for an instant, they wouldadmit they were wrong.' The fatal day for the tests dawnedat last—what an interesting day it would have been—but atthe last‘ moment Pasteur’s enemies backed down. Pasteurdid his experiments before the Commission—he did themconfidently with ironical remarks—and a little while laterthe 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 sideshappened to be right. Pouchet and his friends had usedhay instead of yeast soup, and a great Englishman, Tyn-dall, found out years later that hay holds wee stubborn

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seeds of microbes that will stand boiling for hours! Itwas really Tyndall that finally settled this great quarrel;it was Tyndall that proved Pasteur was right.

Pasteur was now presented to the Emperor Napoleon III.He told that dreamy gentleman that his whole ambitionwas to find the microbes that he was sure must be thecause of disease. He was invited to an imperial houseparty at Compiegne. The guests were commanded to getready to go hunting, but Pasteur begged to be excused;he had had a dray load of apparatus sent up from Paris—though he was only staying at the palace for a week!—and he impressed their Imperial Majesties enormously bybending over his microscope while everybody else was oc-cupied with frivolous and gay amusements.

The world must know that microbes have got to haveparents! At Paris he made a popular speech at the scien-tific soiree at the Sorbonnc, before Alexandre Dumas, thenovelist, and the woman genius, George Sand, the PrincessMathilde, and a hundred more smart people. That nighthe staged a scientific vaudeville that sent his audiencehome in awe and worry; he showed them lantern slidesof a dozen different kinds of germs; mysteriously hedarkened the hall and suddenly shot a single bright beamof light through the blackness. “Observe the thousands ofdancing 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 de-spise always, for sometimes they carry disease and death;the typhus, the cholera, the yellow fever and many otherpestilences!” This was dreadful news; his audience shud-dered, convinced by his sincerity. Of course this news wasnot striedy true, but Pasteur was no mountebank—he

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believed it himself 1 Dust and the microbes of the dusthad become his life—he was obsessed with dust. At dinner,even at the smartest houses, he would hold his plates andspoons close up to his nose, peer at them, scour them withhis napkin, he was with a vengeance putting microbes onthe map. . . .

Every Frenchman from the Emperor down was be-coming excited about Pasteur and his microbes. Whisper-ings of mysterious and marvelous events seeped throughthe gates of the Normal School. Students, even professors,passed the laboratory a little atremble with awe. Onestudent might be heard remarking to another, as theypassed the high gray walls of the Normal School in theRue d’Ulm: “There is a man working here—his nameis Pasteur—who is finding out wonderful things about themachinery of life, he knows even about the origin of life,he is even going to find out, perhaps, what causesdisease. . . .” So Pasteur succeeded in getting anotheryear added to the course of scientific studies; new labora-tories began to go up; his students shed tears of emotionat the fiery eloquence of his lectures. He talked aboutmicrobes causing disease long before he knew anythingabout whether or not they caused disease--he hadn’t yetgot his fingers at the throats of mysterious plagues anddreadful deaths, but he knew there were other ways tointerest the public, to arouse even such a hardheaded per-son as the average Frenchman.

“I beg you,” he addressed the French people in a pas-sionate pamphlet, “take some interest in those sacreddwellings meaningly called laboratories. Ask that they bemultiplied and completed. They are the temples of thefuture, of riches and comfort.’’ Fifty years ahead of histime as a forward-looking prophet, he held fine austereideals up to his countrymen while he appealed to their

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wishes for a somewhat piggish material happiness. A goodmicrobe hunter, he was much more than a mere wool-gathering searcher, much more than a mere man ofscience. . . .

Once more he started out to show all of France howscience could save money for her industry; he packed upboxes of glassware and an eager assistant, Duclaux, andbustled off to Arbois, his old home—he hurried off upthere to study the diseases of wine—tc save the imperiledwine industry. He set up his laboratory in what had beenan old cafe and instead o' gas burners he had to be sat-isfied with an open charcoal brazier that the enthusiasticDuclaux kept glowing with a pair of bellows; from timeto time Duclaux would scamper across to the town pumpfor water; their clumsy apparatus was made by the villagecarpenter and tinsmith. Pasteur rushed around to hisfriends of long ago and begged bottles of wine, bitterwine, ropy wine, oily wine; he knew from his old researchesthat it was yeasts that changed grape juice into wine—he feltcertain that it must be some other wee microscopic beingthat made wines go bad.

Sure enough 1 When he turned his lens on to ropywines he found them swarming with very tiny curiousmicrobes hitched together like strings of beads; he foundthe bottles of bitter wine infested with another kind ofbeast and the kegs of turned wine by still another. Thenhe called the winegrowers and the merchants of the regiontogether and proceeded to show them magic.

“Bring me a half dozen bottles of wine that has gonebad with different sicknesses,” he asked them. “Do nottell me what is wrong with them, and I’ll tell you whatails them without tasting them.” The winegrowers didn’tbelieve him; among each other they snickered at him asthey went to fetch the bottles of sick wine; they laughed

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at the fantastic machinery in the old cafe; they took Pas-teur for some kind of earnest lunatic. They planned tofool him and brought him bottles of perfectly good wineamong the sick ones. Then he set about flabbergastingthem! With a slender glass tube he sucked a drop ofwine out of a bottle and put it between two little slips ofglass before his microscope. The wine raisers nudged eachother and winked French winks of humorous commonsense, while Pasteur sat hunched over his microscope, andthey became more merry as minutes passed. . . .

Suddenly he looked at them and said: “There is noth-ing the matter with this wine—give it to the taster—lethim see if I’m right.”

The taster did his tasting, then puckered up his purplenose and admitted that Pasteur was correct; and so itwent through a long row of bottles—when Pasteur lookedup from his microscopes and prophesied: “Bitter wine”—it turned out to be bitter; and when he foretold thatthe next sample was ropy, the taster acknowledged thatropy was right!

The wine raisers mumbled their thanks and lifted theirhats to him as they left. “We don’t get the way he doesthis—but he is a very clever man, very, very clever,” theymuttered. That is much for a peasant Frenchman to admit. . . .

When they left, Pasteur and Duclaux worked trium-phantly in their tumbledown laboratory; they tackled thequestion of how to keep these microbes out of healthywines—they found at last that if you heat wine just afterit has finished fermenting, even if you heat it gently, waybelow the point of boiling, the microbes that have nobusiness in the wine will be killed—and the wine will notbecome sick. That little trick is now known to everybodyby the name of pasteurization.

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Now that people of the East of France had been shownhow to keep their wine from going bad, the people ofthe middle of France clamored for Pasteur to come andsave their vinegar-making industry. So he rushed downto Tours. He had got used to looking for microscopicbeings in all kinds of things by now—he no longergroped as he had had to do at first; he approached thevinegar kegs, where wine was turning itself into vinegar,he saw a peculiar-looking scum on the surface of the liquorin the barrels. “That scum has to be there, otherwise weget no vinegar,” explained the manufacturers. In a fewweeks of swift, sure-fingered investigation that astonishedthe vinegar-makers and their wives, Pasteur found thatthe scum on the kegs was nothing more nor less thanbillions upon billions of microscopic creatures. He tookoff great sheets of this scum and tested it and weighed ifand fussed v/ith it, and at last he told an audience oivinegar-makers and their wives and families that the mi-crobes which change wine to vinegar actually eat up andturn into vinegar ten thousand times their own weight ofalcohol in a few days. What gigantic things these infinitelytiny beings can do—think of a man of two hundredpounds chopping two millions of pounds of wood in fourdays! It was by some such homely comparison as this onethat he made microbes part of these humble people’s lives,it was so that he made them respect these miserably smallcreatures; it was by pondering on their fiendish capacityfor work that Pasteur himself got used to the idea thatthere was nothing so strange about a tiny beast, no largerthan the microbe of vinegar, getting into an ox or an ele-phant or a man—and doing him to death. Before heleft them he showed the people of Tours how to cultivateand care for those useful wee creatures that so strangely

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added oxygen to wine to turn it into vinegar—and mil-lions of francs for them.

These successes made Pasteur drunk with confidence inhis method of experiment; he began to dream impossiblegaudy dreams—of immense discoveries and super-Napo-leonic microbe huntings—and he did more than broodalone over these dreams; lie put them into speeches andpreached them. He became, in a word, a new John theBaptist of the religion of the Germ Theory, but unlikethe unlucky Baptist, Pasteur was a forerunner who livedto see at least some of his prophecies come true.

Then for a short time he worked quietly in his labora*tory 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 onhim and asked him to change himself from a man ofscience into a silkworm doctor. “What’s wrong with silk-worms? I did not know that they ever had diseases—Iknow nothing at all about silkworms—what’s more, Ihave never even seen one!” protested Pasteur.

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“The silk country of the South is my native country,”answered Dumas. “Fve just come back from there—it isterrible—I cannot sleep nights for thinking of it, my poorcountry, my village of Alais. . . . This country that usedto be rich, that used to be gay with mulberry trees whichmy people used to call the Golden Tree—this country isdesolate now. The lovely terraces are going to ruin—thepeople, they are my people, they are starving. . . Tearswere in his voice.

Anything but a respecter of persons, Pasteur who lovedand respected himself above all men, had always kept a

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couching reverence for Dumas. He must help his sadold professor! But how? It is doubtful at this time ifPasteur could have told a silkworm from an angle worm!Indeed, a little later, when he was first given a cocoon toexamine, he held it up to his car, shook it, and cried:“Why, there is something inside it!” Pasteur hated to goSouth to try to find out what ailed silkworms, he knewhe risked a horrid failure by going and he detested failureabove everything. But it is one of the charming thingsabout him that in the midst of all his arrogance, his vul-gar sureness of himself, he had kept that boyish love andreverence for his old master—so he said to Dumas: “I amin your hands, I’m at your disposal, do with me as youwish—I will go!”

So he went. He packed up the never complainingMadame Pasteur and the children and a microscope andthree energetic and worshiping young assistants and hewent into the epidemic that was slaughtering millions ofsilkworms and ruining the South of France. Knowing lessof silkworms and their sicknesses than a babe in swaddlingclothes he arrived in Alais; he got there and he learnedthat a silkworm spins a cocoon round itself and turns intoa chrysalid inside the cocoon; he found out that the chrys-alid changes into a moth that climbs out and lays eggs—which hatch out the next spring into new broods of youngsilkworms. The silkworm growers—disgusted at his greatignorance—told him tha* the disease which was killingtheir worms was called pebrine, because the sick wormswere covered with little black spots that looked like pepper.Pasteur found out that there were a thousand or sotheories about the sickness, but that the little pepper spots—and the curious little globules inside the sick worms,wee globules that you could see only with a microscope—were the only facts that were known about it.

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Then Pasteur unlimbered his microscope, before he hadgot his family settled—he was like one of those troutfishing maniacs who starts to cast without thought ofsecuring his canoe safely on the bank—he unlimbered hismicroscope, I say, and began to peer at the insides of sickworms, and particularly at these wee globules. Quickly heconcluded that the globules were a sure sign of the disease.Fifteen days after he had come to Alais he called theAgricultural Committee together and told them: “Atthe moment of egg-laying put aside each couple of moths,the father and the mother. Let them mate; let the motherlay her eggs—then pin the father and mother moths downonto a little board, slit open their bellies and take out alittle of the fatty tissue under their skin; put this under amicroscope and look for those tiny globules. If you can’tfind any, you can be sure the eggs are sound—you canuse those eggs for new silkworms in the spring.”

The committee looked at the shining microscope. “Wefarmers can’t run a machine like that,” they objected. Theywere suspicious, they didn’t believe in this newfangled ma-chine. Then the salesman that was in Pasteur came to thefront. “Nonsense!” he answered. “There is an eight-year-old girl in my laboratory who handles this microscopeeasily and is perfectly able to spot these little globules—these corpuscles—and then you grown men try to tell meyou couldn’t learn to use a microscope!” So he shamedthem. And the committee obediently bought microscopesand tried to follow his directions. Then Pasteur started ahectic life; he was everywhere around the tragic silkcountry, lecturing, asking innumerable questions, teachingthe farmers to use microscopes, rushing back to the labora-tory to direct his assistants—he directed them to do com-plicated experiments that he hadn’t time to do, or evenwatch, himself—and in the evenings he dictated answers

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to letters and scientific papers and speeches to MadamePasteur. The next morning he was off again to the neigh-boring towns, cheering up despairing farmers and harangu-ing them. . . .

But the next spring his bubble burst, alas. The nextspring, when it came time for the worms to climb theirmulberry twigs to spin their silk cocoons, there was ahorrible disaster. His confident prophecy to the farmersdid not come true. These honest people glued their eyesto their microscopes to pick out the healthy moths, so asto get healthy eggs, eggs without the evil globules in them—and these supposed healthy eggs hatched worms, sad totell, who grew miserably, languid worms who would noteat, strange worms who failed to molt, sick worms whoshriveled up and died, lazy worms who hung around atthe bottoms of their twigs, not caring whether there wasever another silk stocking on the leg of any fine lady inthe world.

Poor Pasteur! He had been so busy trying to save thesilkworm industry that he hadn’t taken time to find outwhat really ailed the silkworms. Glory had seduced himinto becoming a mere savior—for a moment he forgot thatTruth is a will o’ the wisp that can be caught only in thenet 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 findbottom. He came on broods of silkworms who fairlygalloped up the twigs and proceeded to spin elegant co-coons—then at the microscope he found these beasts swarm-ing with the tiny globules. He discovered other broodsthat sulked on their branches and melted away with agassy diarrhoea and died miserably—but in these he couldfind no globules whatever. He became completely mixed

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up; he began to doubt whether the globules had anythingto do with the disease. Then to make things worse, micegot into the broods of his experimental worms and madecheerful meals on them and poor Duclaux, Maillot andGernez had to stay up by turns all night to catch theraiding mice; next morning everybody would be juststarted working when black clouds appeared in the West,and all of them—Madame Pasteur and the children bring-ing up the rear—had to scurry out to cover up the mul-berry trees. In the evenings Pasteur had to settle histired back in an armchair, to dictate answers to peevedsilkworm growers who had lost everything—using hismethod of sorting eggs.

After a series of such weary months, his instinct to doexperiments, this instinct—and the Goddess of Chance—came together to save him. He pondered to himself: “I’veat least managed to scrape together a few broods of healthyworms—if I feed these worms mulberry leaves smearedwith the discharges of sick worms, will the healthy wormsdie?” He tried it, and the healthy worms died sureenough, but, confound it! the experiment was a fizzleagain—for instead of getting covered with pepper spotsand dying slowly in twenty-five days or so, as worms al-ways do of pebrine—the worms of his experiment curledup and passed away in seventy-two hours. He was dis-couraged, he stopped his experiments; his faithful assistantsworried about him—why didn’t he try the experimentover?

At last Gernez went of? to the north to study the silk-worms of Valenciennes, and Pasteur, not clearly knowingthe reason why, wrote to him and asked him to do thatfeeding experiment up there. Gernez had some nice broodsof healthy worms. Gernez was sure in his own head—nomatter what his chief might think—that the wee globules

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were really living things, parasites, assassins of the silk-worm. He took forty healthy worms and fed them ongood healthy mulberry leaves that had never been fed onby sick beasts. These worms proceeded to spin twenty-seven good cocoons and there were no globules in themoths that came from them. He smeared some otherleaves with crushed-up sick moths and fed them to someday-old worms—and these worms wasted away to a slowdeath, they became covered with pepper spots and theirbodies swarmed with the sub-visible globules. He tooksome more leaves with crushed-up sick moths and fedthese to some old worms just ready to spin cocoons; theworms lived to spin the cocoons, but the moths that cameout of the cocoons were loaded with the globules, and theworms from their eggs came to nothing. Gernez wasexcited—and he became more excited when still nightsat his microscope showed him that the globules increasedtremendously as the worms faded to their deaths. . . .

Gernez hurried to Pasteur. “It is solved,” he cried, “thelittle globules are alive—they are parasites!—They arewhat make the worms sick!”

It was six months before Pasteur was convinced thatGernez was right, but when at last he understood, heswooped back on his work, and once more called the Com-mittee together. “The little corpuscles are not only a signof the disease, they are its cause. These globules are alive,they multiply, they force themselves into every part of themoth’s body. Where we made our mistake was to ex-amine only a little part of the moth, we only looked underthe skin of the moth’s belly—we’ve got to grind up thewhole beast and examine all of it. Then if we do notfind the globules we can safely use the eggs for next year’sworms!”

The committee tried the new scheme and it worked—

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the next year they had fine worms that gave them splen-did yields of silk.

Pasteur saw now that the little globule, the cause of thepebritie, came from outside the worm—it did not rise byitself inside the worm—and he went everywhere, showingthe farmers how to keep their healthy worms away fromall contact with leaves that sick worms had soiled. Thensuddenly he fell a victim of a hemorrhage of the brain—he nearly died, but when he heard that work of buildinghis new laboratory had been stopped, frugally stopped inexpectation of his death, he was furious and made up hismind 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 spiteof his handicap. At a time when he should have stayed inhis bed, or have gone to the seaside, he staggered to hisfeet and limped to the train for the South, exclaiming in-dignantly that it would be criminal not to finish savingthe silkworms while so many poor people were starving!All Frenchmen, excepting a few nasty fellows who calledit a magnificent gesture, joined in praising him and ador-ing him.

For six years Pasteur struggled with the diseases of silk-worms. He had no sooner settled pebrine than anothermalady of these unhappy beasts popped up, but he knewhis problem and found the microbe of this new diseasemuch more quickly. Tears of joy were in the voice ofold Dumas now as he thanked his dear Pasteur—and themayor of the town of Alais talked enthusiastically of rais-ing a golden statue to the great Pasteur.

VII

He was forty-five. He wallowed in this glory for a mo-ment, and then—having saved the silkworm industry, with

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the help of God and Gernez—he raised his eyes towardone of those bright, impossible, but always partly truevisions that it was his poet’s gift to see. He raised hisartist’s eyes from the sicknesses of silkworms to the sor-rows of men, he sounded a trumpet call of hope to suffer-ing mankind: 1

“It is in the power of man to make parasitic maladiesdisappear from the face of the globe, if the doctrine ©fspontaneous generation is wrong, as I am sure it is.”

The siege of Paris in the bitter winter of 1870 haddriven him from his work to his old home in the Jurahills. He wandered pitifully around battlefields lookingfor his son who was a sergeant. Here he worked himselfup into a tremendous hate, a hate that never left him, ofall things German; he became a professional patriot.“Every one of my works will bear on its title page, ‘Hatredto Prussia. Revenge! Revenge!* ” he shrieked, good loyalFrenchman that he was. Then with a magnificent sillinesshe proceeded to make his next research a revenge research.Even he had to admit that French beer was much inferiorto the beer of the Germans. Well—he would make thebeer of France better than the beer of Germany—he mustmake the French beer the peer of beers, no, the emperorof all beers of the world!

He embarked on vast voyages to the great breweries ofFrance and here he questioned everybody from the brew-master in his studio to the lowest workman that cleanedout the vats. He journeyed to England and gave adviceto those red-faced artists who made English porter and tothe brewers of the divine ale of Bass and Burton. Hetrained his microscope on the must of a thousand beervats to watch the yeast globules at their work of buddingand making alcohol. Sometimes he discovered the samekind of miserable sub-visible beings that hqghad found in

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sick wines years before, and he told the brewers that ifthey would heat their beer, they would keep these invadersout; he assured them that then they would be able tcship their beer long distances, that then they would beable to brew the most incredibly marvelous of all beers!He begged money for his laboratory from brewers, explain-ing to them how they would be repaid a thousand fold,and with this money he turned his old laboratory at theNormal School into a small scientific brewery that glitteredwith handsome copper vats and burnished kettles.

But in the midst of all this feverish work, alas, Pasteurgrew sick of working on beer. He hated the taste of beerjust as he loathed the smell of tobacco smoke; to his dis-gust he found that he would have to become a good beer-taster in order to become a great beer-scientist, to his dis-may he discovered that there was much more to the artof brewing than simply keeping vicious invading microbesout of beer vats. He puckered his snub nose and buriedhis serious mustache in foamy mugs and guzzled deter-mined draughts of the product of his pretty kettles—buthe detested this beer, even good beer, in fact all beer.Bertin, the physics professor, his old friend, smacked hislips and laughed at him as he swallowed great gulps ofbeer that Pasteur had denounced as worthless. Even theyoung assistants snickered—but never to his face. Pasteur,most versatile of men, was after all not a god. He wasan investigator and a marvelous missionary—but beer-loving is a gift that is born in a limited number of con-noisseurs, just as the ear for telling good music from trashis born in some men!

Pasteur did help the French beer industry. For that wehave the testimony of the good brewers themselves. It ismy duty to doubt, however, the claims of those idolizerfof his who insist that he made French the equal of Ger

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man beer. I do not deny this claim, but I beg that it besubmitted to a commission, one of those solemn impartialinternational commissions, the kind of commission thatPasteur himself so often demanded to decide before allthe world whether he or his detested opponents were inthe right. . . .

Pasteur’s life was becoming more and more unlike theaustere cloistered existence that most men of science lead.His experiments became powerful answers to the objectionsthat swarmed on every side against his theory of germs,they became loud public answers to such objections—rather than calm quests after facts; but in spite of hisdragging science into the market place, there is no doubtthat his experiments were marvelously made, that the^fired the hopes and the imagination of the world. He gothimself into a noisy argument on the way yeasts turngrape juice into wine, with two French naturalists, Fremyand Trecul. Fremy admitted that yeasts were needed tomake alcohol from grape juice, but he argued ignorantlybefore the amused Academy that yeasts were spontaneouslygenerated inside of grapes. The wise men of the Academypooh-poohed; they were amused, all except Pasteur.

“So Fremy says that yeasts rise by themselves inside thegrape!” cried Pasteur. “Well, let him answer this experi-ment then!” He took a great number of round-belliedflasks and filled them part full of grape juice. He dreweach one out into a swan’s neck; then he boiled the grapejuice in all of them for a few minutes and for days andweeks this grape juice, in every one of all these flasks,showed no bubbles, no yeasts, there was no fermentationin them. Then Pasteur went to a vineyard and gathereda few grapes—they were just ripe—and with a pure waterhe washed the outsides of them with a clean, heated,badger hairbrush. He put a drop of the wash water under

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his lens—sure enough!—there were globules, a few weeglobes, of yeasts. Then he took ten of his swan neck flasksand ingeniously sealed straight tubes of glass into theirsides, and through these straight tubes in each one he puta drop of this wash water from the ripe grapes. PrcstolEvery one of these ten flasks were filled to the neck in afew days with the pink foam of a good fermentation.There was a little of the wash water left; he boiled thatand put drops of this through the straight tubes of tenmore flasks. “Just so!” he cried a few days later, “there’sno fermentation in these flasks, the boiling has killed theyeasts in the wash water.”

“Now I shall do the most remarkable experiment ofall—I’ll prove to this ignorant Fremy that there are noyeasts inside of ripe grapes,” and he took a little hollowtube with a sharp point, scaled shut; it was a little tubehe had heated very hot in an oven to kill all life—allyeasts—that might have been in it. Carefully he forcedthe sharp closed point of the tube through the skin intothe middle of the grape; delicately he broke the sealedtip inside the grape—and the little drop of juice thatwelled up into the lube he transferred with devilish cun-ning into another swan-necked flask part filled with grapejuice. A few days later he cried, “That finishes Fremy-^there is no fermentation in this flask at all—there is no yeastinside the grape!” He went on to one of those sweepingstatements he loved to make: “Microbes never rise bythemselves inside of grapes, or silkworms, or inside ofhealthy animals—in animal’s blood or urine. All microbeshave to get in from the outside! That settles Fremy.”Then you can fancy him whispering to himself: “Theworld will soon learn the miracles that will grow fromthis little experiment.”

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VIII

Surely it looked then as if Pasteur had a right to hisfantastic dreams of wiping out disease. He had just re-ceived a worshiping letter from the English surgeon Lister—and this letter told of a scheme for cutting up sickpeople in safety, of doing operations in a way that keptout that deadly mysterious infection that in many hospitalskilled eight people out of ten. “Permit me,” wrote Lister,“to thank you cordially for having shown me the truth ofthe theory of germs of putrefaction by your brilliant re-searches, and for having given me the single principlewhich has made the antiseptic system a success. If youever come to Edinburgh it will be a real recompense toyou, I believe, to see in our hospital in how large a meas-ure humanity has profited from your work.”

Like a boy who has just built a steam engine all byhimself Pasteur was proud; he showed the letter to allhis friends; he inserted it with all its praise in his scientificpapers; he published it—of all places—in his book on beer!Then he took a final smash at poor old Fremy, who youwould have thought was already sufficiently crushed bythe gorgeous experiments; he smashed Fremy not bydamning Fremy, but by praising himself! He spoke ofhis own “remarkable discoveries,” he called his owntheories the true ones and ended: “In a word, the markof true theories is their fruitfulness. This is the character-istic which Mr. Balard, with an entirely fatherly friendli-ness, has made stand out in speaking of my researches.”Fremy had no more to say.

All Europe by now was in a furor about microbes, andhe knew it was himself that had changed microbes fromplaythings into useful helpers of mankind—and perhaps,the world would soon be astounded by it—into dread

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infinitesimal ogres and murdering marauders, the worstenemies of the race. He had become the first citizen ofFrance and even in Denmark prominent brewers werehaving his bust put in their laboratories. When suddenlyClaude Bernard died, and some of Bernard’s friends pub-lished this great man’s unfinished work. Horrible to tell,this unfinished work had for its subject fermentation ofgrape juice into wine, and it ended by showing that thewhole theory of Pasteur was destroyed because . . . andBernard closed by giving a series of reasons.

Pasteur could not believe his eyes. Bernard had donethis, the great Bernard who had been his seatmate in theAcademy and had always praised his work; Bernard whohad exchanged sly sarcastic remarks with him at the Acad-emy of Medicine about those blue-coated pompous brass-buttoned doctors whose talk was keeping real experimentout of medicine. “It’s bad enough for these doctors andthese half-witted naturalists to contradict me—but trulygreat men have always appreciated my work—and nowBernard . . you can hear him muttering.

Pasteur was overwhelmed, but only for a moment. Hedemanded Bernard’s original manuscript. They gave it tohim. He studied it with all the close attention in hispower. He found Bernard’s experiments were only be-ginnings, rough sketches; gleefully he found that Bernard’sfriends who had published it had made some discieetchanges to make it read better. Then he rose one day, tothe scandal of the entire Academy and the shocked horrorof all the great men of France, and bitterly scolded Ber-nard’s friends for publishing a research that had dared toquestion his own theories. Vulgarly he shouted objectionsat Bernard—who, after all, could not answer Pasteur fromhis grave. Then he published a pamphlet against his olddead friend’s last researches. It was a pamphlet in the

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worst of taste, accusing Bernard of having lost his mem-ory. That pamphlet even claimed that Bernard, who wasto his finger tips a hard man of science, had become taintedwith mystical ideas by associating too much with literarylights of the French Academy. It even proved that in hislast researches Bernard couldn’t see well any more—“I’llwager he had become farsighted and could not see theyeasts!” cried Pasteur. Vulgarly, by all this criticism, heleft people to conclude that Bernard had been in his dotagewhen he did his last work—without any sense of thefitness of things this passionate Pasteur jumped up anddown on Bernard’s grave.

Finally he argued with Bernard by beautiful experiments—a thing most other men would have done without mak-ing unseemly remarks. Like an American about to builda skyscraper in six weeks he rushed to carpenters andhardware stores and bought huge pieces of expensive glassand with this glass he had the carpenters build ingeniousportable hothouses. His assistants worked dinnerless andsleepless, preparing flasks and microscopes and wads ofheated cotton; and in an unbelievably short time Pasteurgathered up all this ponderous paraphernalia and hastenedto 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 thewinds and went directly to the point of settling: “Doesmy theory of fermentation hold?”

Coming to his own little vineyard in Arbois, he hastilyput up his hothouses around a part of his grape-vines.They were admirable close-fitting hothouses that sealedthe grape-vines from the outside air. “It’s midsummer,now, the grapes are far from ripe,” he pondered, “and Iknow that at this time there are never any yeasts to befound on the grapes.” Then, to make doubly sure that no

yeasts from the air could fall on the grapes, he carefullywrapped wads of cotton—which his assistants had heatedto kill all living beings—around some of the bunchesunder the glass of the hothouses. He hurried back toParis and waited nervously for the grapes to ripen. Hewent back to Arbois too soon in his frantic eagerness toprove that Bernard was wrong—but at last he got thereto find them ripe. He examined the hothouse grapeswith his microscope; there was not a yeast to be foundon their skins. Feverishly he crushed some of them up incarefully heated bottles—not a single bubble of fermen-tation rose in these flasks—and when he did the samething to the exposed grapes from the vines outside thehothouse, these bubbled quickly into wine! At last hegathered up Madame Pasteur and some of the vines withtheir cotton-wrapped bunches of grapes—he was going totake these back to the Academy, where he would offer abunch to each member that wanted one, and he was go-ing to challenge everybody to try to make wine from theseprotected bunches. . . . He knew they couldn’t do it with-out putting yeasts into them. . . . He would show themall Bernard was wrong! Madame Pasteur sat stiffly in thetrain all the way back to Paris, carefully holding the twigsstraight up in front of her so that the cotton wrappingswouldn’t come undone. It was a whole day’s trip toParis. . . .

Then at the next meeting Pasteur told the Academy ofhow he had quarantined his grape-vines against yeasts:“Is it not worthy of attention,” he shouted, “that in thisvineyard of Arbois, and this would be true of millions ofacres of vineyards all over the world, there was at themoment I made these experiments, not a speck of soilwhich was not capable of fermenting grapes into wine;and is it not remarkable that, on the contrary, the soil of

my hothouses could not do this? And why? Because ata definite moment, I covered this soil with some/glass. . .

Then he jumped to marvelous predictions, propheciesthat have since his time come true, he leaped to poetry,I say, that makes you forget his vulgar wrangling withhis dead friend Bernard. “Must we not believe, as well,that a day will come when preventive measures that areeasy to apply, will arrest those plagues . . and he paintedthem a lurid picture of the terrible yellow fever that justthen had changed the gay streets of New Orleans into adesolation. He made them shiver to hear of the blackplague on the far banks of the Volga. Finally he madethem hope . . .

Meanwhile in a little village in Eastern Germany ayoung stubborn round-headed Prussian doctor was startingon his road to those very miracles that Pasteur was proph-esying—this young doctor was doing strange experimentswith mice in time stolen from his practice. He was de-vising ingenious ways to handle microbes so that he couldbe dead sure he was handling only one kind—he waslearning to do a thing that Pasteur with all his brilliantskill had never succeeded in doing. Let us leave Pasteurfor a while—even though he is on the threshold of hismost exciting experiments and funniest arguments—letus leave him for a chapter and go with Robert Koch,while he is learning to do fantastic, and marvelously im-portant things with those microbes which had been sub-jects of Pasteur’s kingdom for so many years.

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CHAPTER IV

KOCH

The Death Fighter

In those astounding and exciting years between i860 and1870, when Pasteur was saving vinegar industries andastonishing emperors and finding out what ailed sick silk-worms, a small, serious, and nearsighted German waslearning to be a doctor at the University of Gottingen.His name was Robert Koch. He was a good student, butwhile he hacked at cadavers he dreamed of going tiger-hunting in the jungle. Conscientiously he memorizedthe names of several hundred bones and muscles, but thefancied moan of the whistles of steamers bound for theEast chased this Greek and Latin jargon out of his head.

Koch wanted to be an explorer; or to be a military sur-geon and win Iron Crosses; or to be ship’s doctor andvoyage to impossible places. But alas, when he graduatedfrom the medical college in 1866 he became an interne ina not very interesting insane asylum in Hamburg. Here,busy with raving maniacs and helpless idiots, the echoesof Pasteur’s prophecies that there were such things as ter-rible man-killing microbes hardly reached Koch’s ears. Hewas still listening for steamer-whistles and in the eveningshe took walks down by the wharves with Emmy Fraatz;he begged her to marry him; he held out the bait of ro-mantic trips around the world to her. Emmy told Robertthat she would marry him, but on condition that he for-get this nonsense about an adventurous life, provided that

he would settle down to be a practicing doctor, a gooduseful citizen, in Germany.

Koch listened to Emmy—for a moment the allure offifty years of bliss with her chased away his dreams of ele-phants and Patagonia—and he settled down to practicemedicine; he began what was to him a totally uninterest-ing practice of medicine in a succession of unromanticPrussian villages.

Just now, while Koch wrote prescriptions and rode horse-back through the mud and waited up nights for Prussianfarmer women to have their babies, Lister in Scotland wasbeginning to save the lives of women in childbirth—bykeeping microbes away from them. The professors andthe students of the medical colleges of Europe were be-ginning to be excited and to quarrel about Pasteur’s theoryof malignant microbes, here and there men were tryingcrude experiments, but Koch was almost as completelycut off from this world of science as old Leeuwenhoekhad been, two hundred years before, when he first fumbledat grinding glass into lenses in Delft in Holland. It lookedas if his fate was to be the consoling of sick people andthe beneficent and praiseworthy attempt to save the livesof dying people—mostly, of course, he did not save them—and his wife Emmy was quite satisfied with this andwas proud when Koch earned five dollars and forty-fivecents on especially busy days.

But Robert Koch was restless. He trekked from onedeadly village to another still more uninteresting, until atlast he came to Wollstein, in East Prussia, and here, onhis twenty-eighth birthday, Mrs. Koch bought him amicroscope to play with.

You can hear the good woman say: “Maybe that wdlltake Robert’s mind off w'hat he calls his stupid practice. . . perhaps this will satisfy him a little . . . he’s always

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looking at everything with his old magnifying glass. . .

Alas for her, this new microscope, this plaything, tookher husband on more curious adventures than any hewould have met in Tahiti or Lahore; and these weirdexperiences—that Pasteur had dreamed of but which noman had ever had before—came on him out of the deadcarcasses of sheep and cows. These new sights and ad-ventures jumped at him impossibly on his very doorstep,and in his own drug-reeking office that he was so tiredof, that he was beginning to loathe.

“I hate this bluff that my medical practice is ... it isn’tbecause I do not want to save babies from diphtheria . . .but mothers come to me crying—asking me to save theirbabies—and what can I do?—Grope . . . fumble . . .reassure them when I know there is no hope. . . . Howcan I cure diphtheria when I do not even know whatcauses it, when the wisest doctor in Germany doesn’tknow? . . .” So you can imagine Koch complainingbitterly to Emmy, who was irritated and puzzled, andthought that it was a young doctor’s business to do aswell as he could with the great deal of knowledge thathe had got at the medical school—oh! would he never besatisfied ?

But' Koch was right. What, indeed, did doctors knowabout the mysterious causes of disease? Pasteur’s experi-ments were brilliant, but they had proved nothing aboutthe how and why of human sicknesses. Pasteur was atrail-blazer, a fore-runner crying possible future greatvictories over disease, shouting about magnificent stamp-ings out of epidemics; but meanwhile the moujiks of deso-late towns in Russia were still warding off scourges byhitching four widows to a plow and with them drawinga furrow round their villages in the dead of night—andtheir 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 youdon’t know how to stop.” So Frau Koch might havetried to console him. But in 1873—that is only fifty yearsago—I must repeat that the most eminent doctors hadnot one bit better explanation for the causes of epidemicsthan the ignorant Russian villagers who hitched the townwidows to their plows. In Paris Pasteur was preaching thatmicrobes would soon be found to be the murderers ofconsumptives: and against this crazy prophet rose thewhole corps of the doctors of Paris, headed by the dis-tinguished brass-buttoned Doctor Pidoux.

“What!” roared this Pidoux, “consumption due to agerm—one definite kind of germ? Nonsense! A fatalthought! Consumption is one and many at the same time.Its conclusion is the necrobiotic and infecting destructionof the plasmatic tissue of an organ by a number of roadsthat the hygienist and the physician must endeavor tocloser It was so that the doctors fought Pasteur’s proph-ecies with utterly meaningless and often idiotic words.

Koch was spending his evening* fussing with his newmicroscope, he was beginning to find out just the rightamount of light co shoot up into its lens with the reflect-ing mirror, he was learning just how needful it was tohave his thin glass slides shining clean—those bits of glasson which he liked to put drops of blood from the carcassesof sheep and cows, that had died of anthrax. . . .

Anthrax was a strange disease which was worryingfarmers all over Europe, that here and there ruined someprosperous owner of a thousand sheep, that in anotherplace sneaked in and killed the cow—the one support—ofa poor widow. There was no rime or reason to the way

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this plague conducted its maraudings; one day a fat lambin a flock might be frisking about, that evening this samelamb refused to eat, his head drooped a little—and thenext morning the farmer would find him cold and stiff,his blood turned ghastly black. Then the same thing wouldhappen 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 hidesmight break out in horrible boils—or gasp out their lastbreaths in a swift pneumonia.

Koch had started using his microsope with the more orless thorough aimlessness of old Leeuwenhoek; he ex-amined everything under the sun, until he ran on to thisblood of sheep and cattle dead of anthrax. Then he beganto concentrate, to forget about making a call when hefound a dead sheep in a field—he haunted butcher shopsto find out about the farms where anthrax was killing theflocks. Koch hadn’t the leisure of Leeuwenhoek; he hadto snatch moments for his pecrings, between prescribingfor some child that bawled with a bellyache and the pull-ing out of a villager’s aching tooth. In these interruptedhours he put drops of the blackened blood of a cow deadof anthrax between two thin pieces of glass, very cleanshining bits of glass. He looked down the tube of hismicroscope and among the wee round drifting greenishglobules of this blood he saw strange things that lookedlike little sticks. Sometimes these sticks were short, theremight be only a few of them, floating, quivering a little,among the blood globules. But here were others, hookedtogether without joints—many of them ingeniously gluedtogether till they appeared to him like long threads athousand times thinner than the finest silk.

“What are these things ... are they microbes ... arethey alive? They do not move . . . maybe the sick blood

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of these poor beasts just changes into these threads androds,” Koch pondered. Other men of science, Davaine andRayer in France, had seen these same things in the bloodof dead sheep; and they had announced that these rodswere bacilli, living germs, that they were undoubtedlythe real cause of anthrax—but they hadn’t proved it, andexcept for Pasteur, no one in Europe believed them. ButKoch was not particularly interested in what anybodyelse thought about the threads and rods in the blood ofdead sheep and cattle—the doubts and the laughter ofdoctors failed to disturb him, and the enthusiasms of Pas-teur did not for one moment make him jump at conclu-sions. Luckily nobody anxious to develop young microbehunters had ever heard of Koch, he was a lone wolfsearcher—he was his own man, alone with the mysterioustangled threads in the blood of the dead beasts.

“I do not see a way yet of finding out whether theselittle sticks and threads are alive,” he meditated, “but thereare other things to learn about them. . . .” Then, curi-ously, he stopped studying diseased creatures and beganfussing around with perfectly healthy ones. He went downto the slaughter houses and visited the string butchers andhobnobbed with the meat merchants of Wollstein, andgot bits of blood from tens, dozens, fifties of healthy beaststhat had been slaughtered for meat. He stole a little moretime from his tooth-pullings and professional layings-on-of-hands. More, and more Mrs. Koch worried at his nottending 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 ofany healthy animal,” Koch pondered, “—this is all verywell, but it doesn’t tell me whether they are bacilli,whether they are alive ... it doesn’t show me that theygrow, breed, multiply. . . .”

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But how to find this out? Consumptives—whom, alas,he could not help—babies choking with diphtheria, oldladies who imagined they were sick, all his cares of agood physician began to be shoved away into one cornerof his head. How-to-provc-these-wee-sticks-are-alive, thisquestion made him forget to sign his name to prescrip-tions, it made him a morose husband, it made him callthe carpenter in to put up a partition in his doctor’soffice. And behind this wall Koch stayed more and morehours, with his microscope and drops of black blood ofsheep mysteriously dead—and with a growing number ofcages 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 im-patient invalid shuffled her feet in the waiting room, “be-sides, cows would be a little inconvenient to have aroundmy office—but maybe I can give anthrax to these mice. . . maybe in them I can prove that the sticks reallygrow. . . .”

So this foiled globe-trotter started on his strange explora-tions. To me Koch is a still more weird and uncannymicrobe hunter than Leeuwenhoek, certainly he was justas much of a self-made scientist. Koch was poor, he hadhis nose on the grindstone of a medical practice, all thescience he knew was what a common medical course hadtaught him—and from this, God knows, he had learnednothing whatever about the art of doing experiments; hehad no apparatus but Emmy’s birthday present, that be-loved microscope—everything else he had to invent andfashion out of bits of wood and strings and sealing wax.Worst of all, when he came into the living room fromhis mice and microscope to tell Frau Koch about the newstrange things he had discovered, this good lady wrinkledup her nose and told him:

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“But, Robert, you smell so!”

Then he hit upon a sure way to give mice the fatal dis-ease of anthrax. He hadn’t a convenient syringe withwhich to shoot the poisonous blood into them, but aftersundry cursings and the ruin of a number of perfectlygood mice, he took slivers of wood, cleaned them care-fully, heated them in an oven to kill any chance ordinarymicrobes that might be sticking to them. These slivers hedipped into drops of blood from sheep dead of anthrax,blood filled with the mysterious, motionless threads androds, and then—heaven knows how he managed to holdhis wiggling mouse—he made a little cut with a cleanknife at the root of the tail of the mouse, and into thiscut he delicately slid the blood-soaked splinter. Hedropped this mouse into a separate cage and washed hishands and went off in a kind of conscientious wool-gather-ing way to see what was wrong with a sick baby. . . .“Will that beast, that mouse die of anthrax. . . . Yourchild will be able to go back to school next week, FrauSchmidt. ... I hope I didn’t get any of that anthraxblood into that cut on my finger. . . .” Such was Koch’slife.

And next morning Koch came into his home-made lab-oratory—to find the mouse on its back, stiff, its formerlysleek fur standing on end and its whiteness of yesterdayturned into a leaden blue, its legs sticking up in the air.He heated his knives, fastened the poor dead creature ontoa board, dissected it, opened it down to its liver and lights,peered into every corner of its carcass. “Yes, this looks likethe inside of an anthrax sheep , . . see the spleen, howbig, how black it is ... it almost fills the creature’s body.

. . ” Swiftly he cut with a clean heated knife into thisswollen spleen and put a drop of the blackish ooze from itbefore his lens. . . .

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At last he muttered: “They’re here, these sticks andthreads . . . they are swarming in the body of this mouse,exactly as they were in the drop of dead sheep’s bloodthat I dipped the little sliver in yesterday.” DelightedKoch knew that he had caused in the mouse, so cheap tobuy, so easy to handle, the sickness of sheep and cows andmen. Then for a month his life became a monotony ofone dead mouse after another, as, day after day, he took adrop of the blood or the spleen of one dead beast, put itcarefully #on a clean splinter, and slid this sliver into a cutat the root of the tail of a new healthy mouse. Each time,next morning, Koch came into his laboratory to find thenew animal had died, of anthrax, and each time in theblood of the dead beast his lens showed him myriads ofthose sticks and tangled threads—those motionless, twenty-five-thousandth-of-an-inch thick filaments that he couldnever discover in the blood of any healthy animal.

“These threads must be alive,” Koch pondered, “thesliver that I put into the mouse has a drop of blood on itand 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’tlook inside a live mouse!”

How - shall - I - find - a - way - to - see - the - rods -grow - out - into - threads? This question pounded athim while he counted pulses and looked at his patients’tongues. In the evenings he hurried through supper andgrowled goodnight to Mrs. Koch and shut himself up inhis little room that smelled of mice and disinfectant, andtried to find ways to grow his threads outside a mouse’sbody. At this time Koch knew little or nothing about theyeast soups and flasks of Pasteur, and the experiments he

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fussed with had the crude originality of the first cave mantrying to make fire.

“I will try to make these threads multiply in somethingthat is as near as possible like the stuff an animal’s bodyis made of—it must be just like living stuff,” Koch mut-tered, and he put a wee pin-point piece of spleen from adead mouse—spleen that was packed with the tangledthreads, into a little drop of the watery liquid from theeye of an ox. “That ought to be good food for them,” hegrumbled. “But maybe, too, the threads have gtft to havethe temperature of a mouse’s body to grow,” he said, andhe built with his own hands a clumsy incubator, heatedby an oil lamp. In this uncertain machine he depositedthe two flat pieces of glass between which he had put thedrop of liquid from the ox-eye. Then, in the middle ofthe night, after he had gone to bed, but not to sleep, hegot up to turn the wick of his smoky incubator lampdown a little, and instead of going back to rest, again andagain he slid the thin strips of glass with their imprisonedinfinitely little sticks before his microscope. Sometimes hethought he could see them growing—but he could not besure, because other microbes, swimming and cavortingones, had an abominable way of getting in between thesestrips of glass, over-growing, choking out the slender dan-gerous rods of anthrax.

“I must grow my rods pure, absolutely pure, withoutany other microbes around,” he muttered. And he keptflounderingly trying ways to do this, and his perplexitypushed up huge wrinkles over the bridge of his nose, andbuilt crow’s-feet round his eyes. . . .

Then one day a perfectly easy, a foolishly simple way towatch his rods grow flashed into Koch’s head. “I’ll putthem in a hanging-drop, where no other bugs can get inamong them,” he muttered. On a flat, clear piece of glass,

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very thin, which he had heated thoroughly to destroy allchance microbes, Koch placed a drop of the watery fluidof an eye from a just-butchered healthy ox; into this drophe delicately inserted the wee-est fragment of spleen, freshout of a mouse that had a moment before died miserablyof anthrax. Over the drop he put a thick oblong piece ofglass with a concave well scooped out of it so that thedrop would not be touched. Around this well he hadsmeared some vaseline to make the thin glass stick to thethick one. Then, dextrously, he turned this simple appa-ratus upside down, and presto!—here was his hanging-drop, his ox-eye fluid with its rod-swarming spleen, impris-oned in the well—away from all other microbes.

Koch did not know it, perhaps, but this—apart fromthat day when Leeuwenhoek first saw little animals inrain water—was a most important moment in microbehunting, and in the fight of mankind against death.

“Nothing can get into that drop—only the rods arcthere—now we’ll see if they will grow,” whispered Kochas he slid his hanging-drop under the lens of his micro-scope; in a kind of stolid excitement he pulled up hischair and sat down to watch what would happen. In thegray circle of the field of his lens he could see only a fewshreddy lumps of mouse spleen—they looked microscopi-cally enormous—and here and there a very tiny rodfloated among, these shreds. He looked—fifty minutes outof each hour for two hours he looked, and nothing hap-pened. But then a weird business began among the shredsof diseased spleen, an unearthly moving picture, a dramathat made shivers shoot up and down his back.

The little drifting rods had begun to grow! Here weretwo where one had been before. There was one slowlystretching itself out into a tangled endless thread, pushingits snaky way across the whole diameter of the field of

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the lens—in a couple of hours the dead small chunks ofspleen were completely hidden by the myriads of rods, themasses of thread that were like a hopelessly tangled ball ofcolorless 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 poorlittle mice—in the sheep, in the cows even. One of theserods, these bacilli—he is a billion times smaller than an ox—just one of them maybe gets into an ox, and he doesn’tbear any grudge against the ox, he doesn’t hate him, buthe grows, this bacillus, into millions, everywhere throughthe big animal, swarming in -his lungs and brain, chokinghis blood-vessels—it is terrible.”

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 headwas now full of nothing but dreadful pictures of the tan-gled skeins of the anthrax threads. Then each day of anervous experiment that lasted eight days Koch repeatedhis miracle of making a million bacilli grow where only afew were before. He planted a wee bit of his rod-swarm-ing hanging-drop into a fresh, pure drop of the wateryfluid of an ox-eye and in every one of these new drops thefew rods grew into myriads.

“I have grown these bacilli for eight generations awayfrom any animal, I have grown them pure, apart fromany other microbe—there is no part of the dead mouse’sspleen, no diseased tissue left in this eighth hanging-drop—only the children of the bacilli that killed the mouse arein it. . . . Will these bacilli still grow in a mouse, or in asheep, if I inject them—are these threads really the causeof anthrax?”

Carefully Koch smeared a wee bit of his hanging-dropthat swarmed with the microbes of the eighth generation

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-this drop was murky, even to his naked eye, with count-less bacilli—he smeared a part of this drop on to a littlesplinter of wood. Then, with that guardian angel whocares for daring stumbling imprudent searchers of naturestanding by him, Koch deftly slid this splinter under theskin of a healthy mouse.

The next day Koch was bending near-sightedly over thebody 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 micro-scope, a bit of the dead creature’s spleen between two thinbits of glass. “I’ve proved it,” he whispers, “here are thethreads, the rods—those little bacilli from my hangingdrop were just as murderous as the ones right out of thespleen of a dead sheep.”

So it was that Koch found in this last mouse exactly thesame kind of microbe that he had spied long before—hav-ing no idea it was alive—in the blood of the first deadcow he had peered at when his hands were fumbling andhis microscope was new. It was precisely the same kind ofbacillus that he had nursed so carefully, through longsuccessions of mice, through I do not know how manyhanging-drops.

First of all searchers, of all men that ever lived, aheadof the prophet Pasteur who blazed the trail for him, Kochhad really made sure that one certain kind of microbecauses one definite kind of disease, that miserably smallbacilli may be the assassins of formidable animals. Hehad angled for these impossibly tiny fish, and spied onthem without knowing anything at all of their habits,their lurking places, of how hardy they might be or howvicious, of how easy it might be for them to leap uponhim from the perfect ambush their invisibility gave them.

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Ill

Cool and stolid, Koch, now that he had come throughthese perils, never thought himself a hero; he did not eventhink of publishing his experiments! To-day it would beinconceivable for a man to do such magnificent work anddiscover such momentous secrets, and keep his mouth shutabout it.

But Koch plugged on, and it is doubtful whether thishesitating, entirely modest genius of a German countrydoctor realized the beauty or the importance of his lonelyexperiments.

He plugged on. He must know more! He went pell-mell at the inoculating of guinea-pigs and rabbits, and atlast even sheep, with the innocent looking but fatal fluidfrom the hanging-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 multipliedinto billions in the animals, in a few hours they teemedpoisonously in what had been robust tissues, choking thelittle veins and arteries with their myriads, turning to asinister black the red blood—so killing the sheep, theguinea-pigs, and the rabbits.

At one fantastic jump Koch had soared out of the vastanonymous rank and file of pill-rollers and landed amongthe most original of the searchers, and the more ingeni-ously he hunted microbes, the more miserably he tendedto the important duties of his practice. Babies in far-offfarms howled, but he did not come; peasants, with jump-ing aches in their teeth, waited sullen hours for him—andat last he had to turn over part of his practice to anotherdoctor. Mrs. Koch saw little of him and worried andwished he would not go on his calls smelling of germi-cides and of his menagerie of animals. But so far as he

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was concerned his suffering patients and his wife mighthave been inhabitants of the other side of the moon—for anew mysterious question was worrying at his head, tug-ging at him, keeping him awake:

How, in nature, do these little weak anthrax bacilli thatfade away and die so easil) m my slides, how do theyget from sick animals to healthy ones?

There were superstitions among the farmers and horsedoctors of Europe about this disease, strange beliefs in re-gard to the mysterious power of this plague that hung al-ways over their flocks and herds like some cruel invisiblesword. Why, this disease is too terrible to be caused bysuch a wretched little creature as a twenty-thousandth-of-an-inch-long bacillus!

“Your little germ may be what kills our herds, all right,Herr Doktor,” the cattle men told Koch, “but how is itthat our cows or sheep can be all right in one pasture—perfectly healthy, and then, when we take them into an-other field, with fine grazing in it, they die like flies?”

Koch knew of this troublesome, mysterious fact too. Heknew that in Auvergne in France there were green moun-tains, horrible mountains where no flock of sheep couldgo without being picked off, one by one, or in dozens andeven hundreds by the black disease, anthrax. And in thecountry of the Beauce there were fertile fields where sheepgrew fat—only to die of anthrax. The peasants shivered atnight by their fires: “Our fields are cursed,” they whis-pered.

These things bothered Koch—how could his tiny bacillilive over winter, even for years, in the fields and on themountains? How could they, indeed, when he had smeareda little bacillus-swarming spleen from a dead mouse on aclean slip of glass, and watched the microbes grow dim,break up, and fade from view? And when he put the

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nourishing watery fluid of ox-eyes on these bits of glass, thebacilli would no longer grow; when he washed the driedblood off and injected it into mice—these little beasts con-tinued to scamper gayly about in their cages. The microbes,which two days before could have killed a heavy cow, weredead!

“What keeps them alive in the fields, then,” mutteredKoch, “when they die on my clean glasses in two days?”

Then one day he ran on to a curious sight under hismicroscope—a strange transformation of his microbes thatgave him a clew to his question; and Koch sat down onhis stool in his eight-by-ten laboratory in East Prussia andsolved the mystery of the cursed fields and mountains ofFrance. He had kept a hanging-drop, in its closed glasswell, at the temperature of a mouse’s body for twenty-fourhours. “Ah, this ought to be full of nice long threads ofbacilli,” he muttered, and looked down the tube of hismicroscope—“What’s this?” he cried.

The outlines of the threads had grown dim, and eachthread was speckled, through its whole length, with littleovals that shone brightly like infinitely tiny glass beads,and these beads were arranged along the threads as per-fectly as a string of pearls.

To himself Koch muttered guttural curses. “Other mi-crobes have doubtless gotten into my hanging-drop,” hegrumbled, but when he looked very carefully he saw thatwasn’t true, for the shiny little beads were inside thethreads—the bacilli that make up the threads have turnedinto these beads! He dried this hanging-drop, and put itaway carefully, for a month or so, and then as luckwould have it, looked at it once more through his lens.The strange strings of beads were still there, shining asbrightly as ever. Then an idea for an experiment got holdof him—he took a drop of pure fresh watery fluid from

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rhe eye of an ox. He placed it on the dried-up smear withiis months-old bacilli that had turned into beads. Hishead swam with confused surprise as he looked, andwatched 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 ordi-nary anthrax bacilli again,” cried Koch, “the beads mustbe the spores of the microbe—the tough form of themthat can stand great heat, and cold, and drying. . . . Thatmust be the way the anthrax microbe can keep itself alivein the fields for so long—the bacilli must turn intospores. . . .”

Then Koch launched himself into thorough, ingenioustests to see if his quick guess was right. Expertly now hetook spleens out of mice which had perished of anthrax—he lifted this deadly stuff out carefully with heated knivesand forceps. Protected from all chance of contaminationby stray microbes of the air, he kept the spleens for a dayat the temperature of a mouse’s body, and, sure enough,the microbes, every thread of them, turned into glassyspores.

Then in experiments that kept him incessantly in hisdirty little room he found that the spores remained alivefor months, ready to hatch out into deadly bacilli the mo-ment he put them into a fresh drop of the watery fluid ofox-eyes, or the instant he stuck them, on one of his thinslivers, into the root of a mouse’s tail.

“These spores never form in an animal while he is stillalive—they only appear after he has died, and then onlywhen he is kept very warm,” said Koch, and he provedthis beautifully by clapping spleens into an ice chest—andin a few days this stuff, smeared on splinters, was nomore dangerous than if he had shot so much beefsteakinto his mice.

It was now the year 1876, and Koch was thirty-fouryears old, and at last he emerged out of the bush ofWollstein, to tell the world—stuttering a little—that it wasat last proved that microbes were the cause of disease.Koch put on his best suit and his gold-rimmed spectaclesand packed up his microscope, a few hanging-drops intheir glass cells, swarming with murderous anthrax ba-cilli; and besides these things he bundled a cage into thetrain with him, a cage that bounced a little with severaldozen healthy white mice. He took a train for Breslau toexhibit 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 ProfessorCohn, the botanist at the University, who had somciimeswritten him encouraging letters.

Professor Cohn, who had been amazed at the marvelousexperiments about which the lonely Koch had writtenhim, old Cohn snickered when he thought of how thisgreenhorn doctor—who had no idea, himself, of howoriginal he was—would surprise the highbrows of theUniversity. He sent out invitations to the most eminentmedicoes of the school to come to the first night ofKoch’s show.

IV

And they came. To hear the unscientific backwoods-man—they came. They came maybe out of friendliness toold Professor Cohn. But Koch didn’t lecture—he wasnever much at talking—instead of telling them that hismicrobes were the true cause of anthrax, he showed thesesophisticated professors. For three days and nfghts heshowed them, taking them in swift steps through thosesearchings he had sweated at—groping and failing often—for years. Never was there a greater come-down for big-

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wigs who had arrived prepared to be indulgent to a no-body. Koch never argued once, he never bubbled andraved and made prophecies—but he slipped slivers intomouse tails with an unearthly cleverness, and the experi-enced professors of pathology opened their eyes to see himhandle 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 sci-entists in the study of diseases in all of Europe, couldhold himself no longer. He rushed from the hall, hurriedto his own laboratory, and burst into the room where hisyoung student searchers were working. He shouted tothem: “My boys, drop everything and go sec DoctorKoch—this man has made a great discovery!” Cohnheimgasped to get his breath.

“But who is this Koch, Herr Professor? We’ve nevereven 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 re-search! He’s done it all by himself, complete—there isnothing 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 mi-crobes ... he will make us all ashamed of ourselves. . . .

Go ” But by this time, all of them, including Paul

Ehrlich, had disappeared through the door.

Seven years before, Pasteur had foretold: “It is withinthe power of man to make parasitic maladies disappearfrom the face of the earth. . . .” And when he said thesewords the wisest doctors .in the world put their fingers totheir heads, thinking: “The poor fellow is cracked!”

But this night Robert Koch had shown the world the

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first step toward the fulfillment of Pasteur’s seemingly in-sane 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 orthe spores of bacilli. Before this fact all doubt must belaid aside that these bacilli are the cause of anthrax,” hetold them finally, as if his experiments had not convincedthem already. And he ended by telling his amazed audi-ence how to fight this terrible disease—how his experi-ments showed a way to stamp it out in the end: “All ani-mals that die of anthrax must be destroyed at once afterthey die—or if they can not be burned, they should beburied deep in the ground, where the earth is so coldthat the bacilli cannot turn into the tough, long-livedspores. . .

So it was that in these three days at Breslau this Kochput a sword Excalibur into the hands of men, with whichto begin the fight against their enemies the microbes, theirfight against lurking death; so it was that he began tochange the whole business of doctors from a foolishhocus-pocus with pills and leeches into an intelligent fightwhere science instead of superstition was the weapon.

Koch fell among friends—among honest generous men—at Breslau. Cohn and Cohnheim, instead of trying tosteal his stuff (there are no fewer shady fellows in sciencethan in any other human activity), these two professorsimmediately set up a great whooping for Koch, an ap-plause that echoed over Europe and made Pasteur a bituneasy for his job as Dean of the Microbe Hunters. Thesetwo friends began to bombard the authorities of the Im-perial Health Office at Berlin about this unknown thatGermany ought to be proud of—they did their best togive Koch a chance to do nothing but chase the microbesof disease, to get away from that dull practice of his.

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Left alone, or snubbed at Breslau, he might easily havegone back to Wollstein to his business of telling people tostick out their tongues. In short, men of science haveeither to be showmen—as Were the magnificent Spallan-zani and the passionate Pasteur—or they have to have im-presarios:

Koch packed up Emmy and his household goods andmoved to Breslau and was given a job as city physician atfour hundred and fifty dollars a year, and was supposedto eke out his living with the private patients that wouldundoubtedly flock to be treated by such a brilliant man.

So thought Cohn and Cohnheim. But the doorbell ofKoch’s little office didn’t ring, hardly any one came toring it, and so Koch learned that it is a great disadvan-tage for a doctor to be brainy and inquire into the finalcauses of things. He went back to Wollstein, beaten, andhere from 1878 to 1880 he made long jumps ahead in mi-crobe hunting once more—spying on and tracking downthe strange sub-visible beings that cause the deadly infec-tions of wounds in animals and in human beings. Helearned to stain all kinds of bacilli with different coloreddyes, so that the very tiniest microbe would stand outclearly. In some unknown way he saved money enoughto buy a camera and stuck its lens against his microscopeand learned—no one helping him—how to take picturesof these little creatures.

“You’ll never convince the world about these murderousbugs until you can show them photographs,” Koch said.“Two men can’t look through one microscope at thesame time, no two men will ever draw the same pictureof a germ—so there’ll always be wrangling and confusion.

. . . But these photographs can’t lie—and ten men canstudy them, and come to an agreement on them. . . .” Soit was that Koch began to try to introduce rime and rea-

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son into the baby science of microbe hunting which uptill now had been as much a wordy brawl as a quest forknowledge.

Meanwhile his friends at Breslau had not forgotten himand in 1880—it was like some bush-leaguer breaking intothe big team—he was told by the government to come toBerlin and be Extraordinary Associate of the ImperialHealth Office. Here he was given a fine laboratory and asudden undreamed-of wealth of apparatus and two assist-ants and enough money so that he could spend sixteen oreighteen hours of his working day among his stains andtubes and chittering guinea-pigs.

By this time the news of Koch’s discoveries had spreadto all of the laboratories of Europe and had crossed theocean and inflamed the doctors of America. The vast ex-citing Battle of the Germ Theory was on! Every medicalman and Professor of Diseases who knew—or thought heknew—the top end from the bottom of a microscope setout to become a microbe hunter. Every week broughtglad news of the supposed discovery of some new deadlymicrobe, surely the assassin of suffering from cancer or ty-phoid fever or consumption. One enthusiast would shoutacross 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 thathe had proved one disease, let us say consumption, to bethe result of the attack of a hundred different species ofmicrobes.

So great was the enthusiasm about germs—and the con-fusion—that Koch’s discoveries were in danger of beinglaughed into obscurity along with the vast magazines fullof balderdash that were being printed on the subject ofthe germ theory.

And yet to-day we demand with a great hue and cry

more laboratories, more microbe hunters, better paidsearchers to free us from the diseases that scourge us.How futile! For progress, God must send us a few moreinfernal marvelous searchers of the kind of Robert Koch.

But in the midst of the danger that foolish enthusiasmwould kill the new science of microbe hunting, Koch kepthis head, and sat down to find a way to grow germspure. “One germ, one kind of germ only, causes one defi-nite kind of disease—every disease has its own specific mi-crobe, I lyjow that,” said Koch—without knowing it. “I'vegot to find a sure easy method of growing one species ofgerm away from all other contaminating ones that are always threatening to sneak in!”

But how to cage one kind of microbe? All manner ofweird machines were being invented to try to keep differ-ent sorts of germs apart. Several microbe hunters devisedapparatus so complicated that when they had finishedbuilding it they probably had already forgotten what theyset out to invent it for. To keep stray germs of the airfrom falling into their bottles some heroic searchers didtheir inoculations in an actual rain of poisonous germi-cides!

Until, one day, Koch—who frankly admitted it was byaccident—looked at the flat surface of half of a boiled po-tato left on a table in his laboratory. “What’s this, I won-der?” he muttered, as he stared at a curious collection oflittle colored droplets scattered on the surface of the po-tato. “Here’s a gray colored drop, here’s a red one, there’sa yellow, a violet one—these little specks must be madeup of germs from the air. I’ll have a look at them.”

He stuck his short-sighted eyes down close to the potatoso that his scraggly little beard almost dragged in it; he

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got ready his thin plates of glass and polished off thelenses of his microscope.

With a slender wire of platinum he fished delicatelyinto one of the gray droplets and put a bit of its slimystuff in a little pure water between two bits of glass, un-der his microscope. Here he saw a swarm of bacilli, swim-ming gently about, and every one of these microbes lookedexactly like his thousands of brothers in this drop. ThenKoch peered at the bugs from a yellow droplet on thepotato, and at those of a red one and a violet one. Thegerms from one were round, from another they had theappearance of swimming sticks, from a third microbeslooked like living corkscrews—but all the microbes in onegiven drop were like their brothers, invariably!

Then in a flash Koch saw the beautiful experiment na-ture had done for him. “Every one of these droplets is apure culture of one definite kind of microbe—a pure col-ony of one species of germs. . . . How simple! Whengerms fall from the air into the liquid soups we havebeen using—the different kinds of them get all mixed upand swim among each other. . . . But when differentbugs fall from the air on the solid surface of this potato—each one has to stay where it falls ... it sticks there . . .then it grows there, multiplies into millions of its ownkind . . . absolutely pure!”

Koch called Loeffler and Gaffky, his two military doc-tor assistants, and soberly he showed them the change inthe whole mixed-up business of microbe hunting that hischance glance at an abandoned potato had brought. Itwas revolutionary! The three of them set to work withan amazing—loyal Frenchmen might call it stupid—Ger-man thoroughness to see if Koch was right. There theysat before the three windows of their room, Koch beforehis microscope on a high stool in the middle, Loeffler and

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| Gaft'ky on stools on his left hand and his right—a kind ofgrimly toiling trinity. They tried to defeat their hopes,but quickly they discovered that Koch’s prophecy was aneven more true one than he had dreamed. They mademixtures of two or three kinds of germs, mixtures thatcould never have been untangled by growing in flasks ofsoup; they streaked these confused species of microbes onthe cut flat surfaces of boiled potatoes. And where eachseparate tiny microbe landed, there it stuck, and grew intoa colony of millions of its own kind—and nothing but itsown kind.

Now Koch, who, by this simple experience of the oldpotato, had changed microbe hunting from a guessinggame into something that came near the surencss of a sci-ence—Koch, I say, got ready to track down the tiny mes-sengers that bring a dozen murderous diseases to mankind.Up till this time Koch had had very little criticism or op-position from other men of science, mainly because he al-most never opened his mouth until he was sure of his re-sults. He told of his discoveries with a disarming modestyand his work was so unanswerably complete—he had away of seeing the objections that critics might make andreplying to them in advance—that it was hard to findprotestors.

Full of confidence Koch went to Professor Rudolph Vir-chow, by far the most eminent German researcher in dis-ease, an incredible savant, who knew more than there wasto be known about a greater number of subjects than anysixteen scientists together could possibly know. Virchowwas, in brief, the ultimate Pooh-Bah of German medicalscience. He had spoken the very last word on clots inblood vessels and had invented the impressive words, het•tropopia, agenesia, and ochronosis, and many others thaf1 have been trying for years to understand the meaning of

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He had—with tremendous mistakenness—maintained thatconsumption and scrofula were two different diseases; butwith his microscope he had made genuinely good, evensuperb descriptions of the way sick tissues look and hehad turned his lens into every noisome nook and crannyof twenty-six thousand dead bodies. Virchow had printed—I do not exaggerate—thousands of scientific papers, onevery subject imaginable, from the shapes of little Germanschoolboys* heads and noses to the remarkably small sizeof the blood vessels in the bodies of sickly green-facedgirls.

Properly awed—as any one would be—Koch tiptoed re-spectfully into this Presence.

“I have discovered a way to grow microbes pure, un-mixed with other germs, Herr Professor/' the bashfulKoch told Virchow, with deference.

“And how, I beg you tell me, can you do that? Itlooks to me to be impossible.”

“By growing them on solid food—I can get beautifulisolated colonies of one kind of microbe on the surface ola boiled potato. . . . And now I. have invented a betterway than that ... I mix gelatin with beef broth . . . andthe gelatin seta and makes a solid surface, and ”

But Virchow was not impressed. He made a sardonicremark that it was so hard to keep different races ofgerms from getting mixed up that Koch would have tohave a separate laboratory for each species of microbe. . . .In short, Virchow was very sniffish and cold to Koch, forhe had come to that time of life when ageing men believethat everything is known and there is nothing more to befound out. Koch went away a bit depressed, but not onejot was he discouraged. Instead of arguing and writingpapers and making speeches against Virchow he launchedhimself into the most exciting and superb of all his mi-

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crobe huntings—he set out to spy upon and discover themost vicious of microbes, that mysterious marauder whicheach year killed one man, woman, and child out of everyseven that died, in Europe, in America. Koch rolled uphis sleeves and wiped his gold-rimmed glasses and set outto hunt down the microbe of tuberculosis.

VI

Compared to this sly murderer the bacillus of anthraxhad been reasonably easy to discover—it was a large bugas microbes go, and the bodies of sick animals were liter-ally alive with anthrax germs when the beasts were aboutto die. But this tubercle germ—if indeed there was such acreature—was a different matter. Many searchers werelooking in vain for it. Leeuwenhoek, with his sharpest ofall eyes, would never have found it even if he had lookedat a hundred sick lungs; Spallanzani’s microscopes wouldnot have been good enough to have revealed this sly mi-crobe; Pasteur, searcher that he was, had neither the pre-cise methods of searching, nor, perhaps, the patience, tolay bare this assassin.

All that was known about tuberculosis was that it mustbe caused by some kind of microbe, since it could betransmitted from sick men to healthy animals. An oldFrenchman, Villemin, had pioneered in this work, andCohnheim, the brilliant professor of Breslau, had foundthat he could give tuberculosis to rabbits—by putting abit of the consumptive’s sick lung into the front chamberof a rabbit’s eye. Here Cohnheim could watch the littleislands of sick tissue—the tubercles—spread and do theirdeadly work; it was a strange clever experiment that waslike looking through a window at a disease growing. . . .

Koch had studied Cohnheim’s experiments closely. “Thisis what I need,” he meditated. “I may not use human be-

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ings for experimental animals, but now I can give the dis-ease, whenever I wish, to animals . . . here is a realchance to study it, handle it, to look for the microbe thatmust cause it . . . there must be a microbe there. . .

So Koch set to work—he did everything with a cold sys-tem that gives one the shivers when one reads his scientificreports—and he got his first consumptive stuff from apowerful man, a laborer aged thirty-six. This man hadbeen superbly healthy three weeks before, when all atonce he began to cough, little pains shot through hischest, his body seemed literally to melt away. Four daysafter this poor fellow entered the hospital, he was dead,riddled with tubercles—every organ was peppered withlittle grayish-yellow, millet-seed-like specks

With this dangerous stuff Koch set to work, alone, forLoeffler had set out to track down the microbe of diph-theria and Gaffky was busy trying to find the sub-visibleauthor of typhoid fever. Koch, meanwhile, crushed theyellowish tubercles from the body of the dead man be-tween two heated knives; he ground these granules upand delicately, with a little syringe, injected them into theeyes of numerous rabbits and under the skins of flocks offoolish guinea-pigs. He put these beasts in clean cagesand tended them lovingly. And while he waited for hiscreatures to develop signs of the consumption, he began topeer with his most powerful microscope through the sicktissues that he had taken from the body of the deadworkman.

For days he saw nothing. His best lenses, that magni-fied many hundred times, showed him only the deadruins of what had once been good healthy lung or liver.“If there is a tubercle microbe, he is such a sneaky fellowthat I won’t be able, perhaps, to see him in his native

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state. But I can try painting the tissue with a powerfuldye—that may make this bug stand out. . .

Day after day, Koch set about staining the stuff fromthe dead workman brown and blue and violet and mostof the colors of the rainbow. Carefully, dipping his handsin the germ-killing bichloride of mercury after almostevery move—blackening and wrinkling them with it—hesmeared the perilous material from the tubercles on thinclean bits of glass and kept these pieces of glass for hoursin a strong blue dye. . . .

Then one morning he took his specimens out of theirbath of stain, and put them under his lens, and focussedhis microscope and out of the gray mist a strange pictureuntangled itself. Lying among the shattered diseased lungcells were curious masses of little, infinitely thin bacilli—blue colored rods—so slim that he could not guess theirsize, and they were less than a fifteen-thousandth of aninch long.

“Ah! they are pretty,” he muttered. “They’re notstraight like the anthrax bugs . . . they have little bendsand curves in them. Wait! here are whole bunches ofthem . . . like cigarettes in a pack—Heh! here is one lonedevil inside a lung cell ... I wonder . . . have I foundhim—that tubercle bug, already?”

Koch went on, precisely, with that efficiency of his, tostaining tubercles from every part of the workman’s body,and everywhere his blue dye showed up these same slen-der crooked bacilli—strange creatures unlike any he hadseen in all the thousands of animals or men, diseased orhealthy, into whose insides he had pried. And now, sorrythings began to happen to his inoculated guinea-pigs andrabbits. The guinea-pigs began to huddle disconsolately inthe corners of their cages; their sleek coats ruffled and

M3

their bouncing little bodies began to fall away until theywere sad bags of bones. They were feverish, their cavort-ings stopped and they looked listlessly at their fine carrotsand their fragrant meals of hay—and one by one theydied. And as these unconscious martyrs died—for Koch’smad curiosity and for suffering men—the little microbehunter pinned them down on his post-mortem board andsoaked their sick hair with bichloride of mercury and pre-cisely and with breathless care cut them open with sterileknives.

And inside these poor beasts Koch found the same kindof grayish-yellow sinister tubercles that had filled the bodyof the workman. Into the baths of blue slain on his eter-nal strips of glass Koch dipped them—and everywhere, inevery one, he found the same terrible curved sticks thathad jumped into hi$ astounded gaze when he had stainedthe lung of the dead man.

“I have it!” he whispered, and called the busy Loefflerand the faithful Gaffky from their own spyings on othermicrobes. “Look!” Koch cried. “One little speck of tuber-cle I put into this beast six weeks ago—there could nothave been more than a few hundred of those bacilli inthat small bit—and now they’ve grown into billions!What devils they are, those germs—from that one place inthe guinea-pig’s groin they have sneaked everywhere intohis body, they have gnawed—they have grown throughthe walls of his arteries ... the blood has carried theminto his bones . . . into the farthest corner of hisbrain. . .

Now he went to hospitals everywhere in Berlin, andbegged the bodies of men or women that had died ofconsumption, he spent dreary days in dead houses andevery evening before his microscope in his laboratorywhere the stillness was broken only by the eerie purrings

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and scurryings of guinea-pigs. He injected the sick tissuefrom 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 twelvepigeons. He didn’t stop with these wholesale insane inocu-lations but shot the same kind of deadly cheesy stuiT intowhite mice and rats and field mice and into two mar-mots. Never in microbe hunting has there been such ap-palling thoroughness.

“Ach! this is a little hard on the nerves, this work,” hemuttered (thinking, perhaps of the lightning move of thepaw of one of his cats jabbing the germ-filled syringe nee-dle into his own hand). For Koch, hunting his invisiblefoes alone, there were so many disagreeable and alwaysimminent possibilities of excitement—of something tragi-cally worse than mere excitement. . . .

But the hand of this completely unheroic looking littlemicrobe hunter never slipped, it just grew drier and morewrinkled and blacker from its incessant baths in the bi-chloride of mercury—that good bichloride, with which inthose old days the groping microbe hunters used to swabdown everything, including their own persons. Then,week by week, in all of Koch’s meowing, crowing,barking, clucking menagerie of beasts those small curvedbacilli grew into their relentless millions—and one by onethe animals died, and gave eighteen-hour-days of work toRobert Koch in post-mortems and blear-eyed peeringsthrough the microscope.

“It is only when a man or beast has tuberculosis that Ican find these blue-stained rods, these bacilli,” Koch toldLoeffler 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 discoveredthe bacillus that is the cause, Herr Doktor ”

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“No—not yet—what I have done might make Pasteursure, but I am not at all convinced yet. ... I have to getthese bacilli out of the bodies of my dying animals now. . . grow them on our beef-broth jelly* pure colonics ofthese microbes I must get, and cultivate them for months,away from any living creature . . . and then, if I inocu-late these cultivations into good healthy animals, and theyget tuberculosis . . .” and Koch’s sober wrinkled fa*esmiled for a moment. Loeffler and Gaffky, ashamed oftheir jumping at conclusions, went back awed to theirown searchings.

Testing every possible combination that his head couldinvent, Koch set out to try to grow his bacilli pure onbeef-broth jelly. He made a dozen different kinds of goodsoup for them, he kept his tubes and bottles at the tem-perature of the room and the temperature of a man’s bodyand the temperature of fever. He cleverly used the sicklungs of guinea-pigs that teemed with bacilli, lungs thatheld no other stray microbes which might over-grow andchoke out those delicate germs which he was sure mustbe the authors of consumption. The stuff from theselungs he planted dangerously into hundreds of tubes andbottles, but all this work ended in—nothing. In brief,those slim bacilli that grew like weeds in tropic gardensin the bodies of his sick animals, those microbes thatswarmed in millions in sick men, those bacilli turned uptheir noses—that is, they would have if they had beenequipped with noses—at the good soups and jellies thatKoch cooked for them. It was no go!

But one day a reason for his failures popped into Koch’shead: “The trouble is that these tubercle bacilli will onlygrow in the bodies of living creatures—they are maybe al-most complete, parasites—I must fix a food for them that

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is as near as possible like the stuff a living animal’s bodyis made of!”

So it was that Koch invented his famous food—blood-serum jelly—for microbes that are too finicky to grow oncommon provender. He went to string-butchers and gotthe clear straw-colored serum from the clotted blood offreshly slaughtered healthy cattle and carefully heated thisfluid to kill all the stray microbes that might have falleninto it. Delicately he poured this serum into each one ofdozens of narrow test-tubes, and placed these on a slant sothat there would be a long flat surface on which to smearthe sick consumptive tissues. Then ingeniously he heatedeach tube just hot enough to make the serum set, on aslant, into a clear beautiful jelly.

That morning a guinea-pig, sadly riddled with tubercu-losis, had died. He dissected out of it a couple of thegrayish yellow tubercles, and then, with a wire of plati-num he streaked bits of this bacillus-swarming stuff onthe moist surface of his serum jelly, on tube after tube ofit. Then, with that drawing in and puffing out of breathhat comes after a nasty piece of work, well done, Kochtook his tubes and put them in the oven—at the exacttemperature of a guinea-pig’s body.

Day after day Koch hurried in the morning to his in-cubating oven, and took out his tubes and held themclose to his gold-rimmed glasses, and saw—nothing.

“Well, I have failed again,” he mumbled—it was thefourteenth day after he had planted his consumptive stuff-“every other microbe I have ever grown multiplies intolarge colonies in a couple of days, but here, confound it—there is nothing, nothing . . .”

Any other man would have pitched these barren disap-pointing serum-tubes out, but at this stubbly-haired coun-

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try doctor’s shoulder his familiar demon whispered: “Wait—be patient, my master—you know that tubercle germssometimes take months, years to kill men. Maybe toothey grow very slowly in the serum tubes.” So Koch didnot pitch the tubes out, and on the morning of the fif-teenth day he came back to his incubator—to find the vel-vety surface of the serum jelly covered with tiny glisten-ing specks! Koch reached a trembling hand for his pocketlens, clapped it to his eye and peered at one tube after an-other, and through his lens these glistening specks swelledout into dry tiny scales. . . .

In a daze Koch pulled the cotton plug out of one of histubes, mechanically he flamed its mouth in the sputteringblue fire of the Bunsen burner, with a platinum wire hepicked off one of these little flaky colonies—they must b»:microbes—and not knowing how or what, he got therbefore his microscope. . . .

Then he knew that he had got to a warm inn on thestony road of his adventure—here they were, countlessmyriads of these same bacilli, these crooked rods that hehad first spied in the lung of the dead workman. Theywere motionless but surely multiplying and alive—theywere delicate and finicky about their food and feeble insize, but more savage than hordes of Huns and moremurderous than ten thousand nests of rattlesnakes.

Now Koch, in taut intent months, confirmed his firstsuccess—he went after proving it with a patience and adetail that made me sick of his everlasting thoroughnessand prudence as I read the endlessly multiplied experi-ments in his classic report on tuberculosis—from consump-tive monkeys and consumptive oxen and consumptiveguinea-pigs Koch grew forty-three different families ofthese deadly rods on his slanted tubes of serum jelly!

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And only from animals sick or dying of tuberculosis,could he grow them. For months he nursed these weemurderers along, planting them from one tube to another—with marvelous watchfulness he kept all other chancemicrobes away from them.

“Now I must shoot these bacilli—these pure cultivationsof my bacilli—into healthy guinea-pigs, into all kinds ofhealthy animals. If then these creatures get tuberculosis, Ishall know that my bacilli are necessarily and beyond alldoubt the cause!”

That man with the terrible single-mindedness of a ma-niac driven by a fixed idea changed his laboratory into theweirdest kind of zoo. He became grouchy to every one—to curious visitors he was a sarcastic, spiteful little Germanogre. Alone he sterilized batteries of shining syringes andshot the crinkly masses of microbes from the cultivationsin his serum-jelly tubes—he injected these bacilli groundup in a little pure water into guinea-pigs and rabbits andhens and rats and mice and monkeys. “That's not enough!”he growled, “Til try some animals that never are known tohave tuberculosis naturally.” So he ranged ahroad andgathered to his laboratory and injected his beloved terriblebacilli into tortoises, sparrows, five frogs and three eels.

Insanely Koch completed this most fantastic test bysticking his microbes from the serum cultivation into—agoldfish!

Days dragged by, weeks passed, and every day Kochwalked into his workshop in the morning and madestraight for the cages and jars that held these momentousanimals. The goldfish continued to open and shut hismouth and swim placidly about in his round-bellied bowl.The frogs croaked unconcernedly and the eels kept all oftheir slippery liveliness; the tortoise now and then stuck

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his head out ok his shell and seemed to wink an eye atKoch as if to say: “Your tubercle bugs are food for me—give me some more.”

But while his injections worked no harm to these crea-tures, that do not in the course of nature get consumptionanyway—at the same time the guinea-pigs began to droop,to lie pitifully on their sides, gasping. One by one theydied, their bodies wasting terribly into tubercles. . . .

Now Koch had forged the last link of the chain of hisexperiments and was ready to give his news to the world:The bacillus, the true cause of tuberculosis, has beentrapped, discovered! When suddenly he decided there wasone more thing to do.

“Human beings surely must catch these bacilli by inhal-ing them, in dust, or from the coughing of people sickwith consumption. I wonder, will healthy animals be in-fected that way too?” At once Koch began to devise waysof doing this experiment—it was a nasty job. “I’ll have tospray the bacilli from my cultivations at the animals,”he pondered. But this was a more serious business thanturning ten thousand murderers out of jail. . . .

Like the good hunter that he was, he took a chancewith the dangers that he couldn’t avoid. He built a bigbox and put guinea-pigs and mice and rabbits inside itand set this box in the garden. Then through the windowhe ran a lead pipe that opened in a spray nozzle insidethe box, and for three days, for half an hour each day, hesat in his laboratory, pumping at a pair of bellows thatshot a poisonous mist of bacilli into the box—to bebreathed by the cavorting beasts inside it.

In ten days three of the rabbits were gasping, fightingfor that precious air that their sick lungs could no longergive them. In twenty-five days the guinea-pigs had done

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their humble work—one and all they were dead, of tuber-culosis.

Koch told nothing of the ticklish job it was to takethese beasts out of their germ-soaked box—if I had beenin his place I would rather have handled a boxful of boa*constrictors—and he makes no mention of how he dis-posed of this little house whose walls had been wet withthis so-deadly spray. What chances for making heroicflourishes were missed by this quiet Koch!

VII

On the twenty-fourth of March in 1882 in Berlin therewas a meeting of the Physiological Society in a plainsmall room made magnificent by the presence of the mostbrilliant men of science in Germany. Paul Ehrlich wasthere and the most eminent Professor Rudolph Virchow—who had but lately sniffed at this crazy Koch and hisalleged bacilli of disease—and nearly all of the famousGerman battlers against disease were there.

A bespectacled wrinkled small man rose and put hisface close to his papers and fumbled with them. The pa-pers quivered and his voice shook a little as he started tospeak. With an admirable modesty Robert Koch toldthese men the plain story of the way he had searched outthe invisible assassin of one human being out of everyseven that died. With no oratorical raisings of his voicehe told these disease fighters that the physicians of theworld were now able to learn all of the habits of thisbacillus of tuberculosis—this smallest but most savage en-emy of men. Koch recited to them the lurking places ofthis slim microbe, its strengths and weaknesses, and heshowed them how they might begin the fight to crush, towipe out this sub-visible deadly enemy.

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At last Koch sat down, to wait for the discussion, theinevitable arguments and objections that greet the finishof revolutionary papers. But no man rose to his feet, noword was spoken, and finally eyes began to turn towardVirchow, the oracle, the Tsar of German science, the^thunderer whose mere frown had ruined great theories ofdisease.

All eyes looked at him, but Virchow got up, put on hishat, and left the room—he had no word to say.

If old Leeuwenhoek, two hundred years before, hadmade so astounding a discovery, Europe of the Seven-teenth Century would have heard the news in months.But in 1882 the news that Robert Koch had found themicrobe of tuberculosis trickled out of the little room ofthe Physiological Society the same evening, sang to Kam-chatka and to San Francisco on the cable wires that night,and exploded on the front pages of the newspapers in themorning. Then the world went wild over Koch, doctorsboarded ships and hopped trains for Berlin to learn fromhim the secret of hunting microbes; vast crowds of themrushed to Berlin to sit at Koch’s feet to learn how to makebeef-broth jelly and how to stick syringes full of germs intothe wiggling carcasses of guinea-pigs.

Pasteur’s deeds had set France by the ears, but Koch’jexperiments with the dangerous tubercle bacilli rocked theearth, 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 hiseager pupils, to snatch what moments he could for hisown new searchings. He loathed teaching—that way hewas precisely like Leeuwenhoek—but he was forced, curs-ing under his breath, to give lessons in microbe huntingto Japanese who spoke horrible German and understoodless than they spoke, and to Portuguese, who could never,

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by any amount of instruction, learn to hunt microbes. Hestarted a huge fight with Pasteur—but of this I shall tellin the next chapter—and between times he showed his as-sistant, Gaffky, how to spy on and track down the bacil-lus of typhoid fever. He was forced to attend idiotic re-ceptions and receive medals, and came away from theseoccasions to guide his fierce-mustached assistant Loefflcr,who was on the trail of the poison-dripping microbe thatkills babies with diphtheria. It was thus that Koch shookthe tree of his marvelous simple method of growing mi-crobes on the surface of solid food—he shook the tree, asGaffky said long afterward, and discoveries rained into hislap.

In all of his writings I have never found any evidencethat Koch considered himself a great originator; never,like Pasteur, did he seem to realize that he was the leaderin the most beautiful and one of the most thrilling battlesof men against cruel nature—there was no actor in thismussy-bearded little man. But he did set under way aninspiring drama, a struggle with the messengers of deaththat turned some of the microbe-hunting actors into ma-niac searchers, men who went to nearly suicidal lengths,almost murderous extremes—to prove that microbes werethe cause of dangerous diseases.

Doctor Fehleisen, to take one instance, went out fromKoch’s laboratory and found a curious little ball-shapedmicrobe, hitched to its brothers in chains like the beads ofa rosary—he cultivated these bugs from skin gouged outof people sick with erysipelas, that sky-rockety disease thatused to be called St. Anthony’s Fire. On the theory thatan attack of erysipelas might cure cancer—a mad man’sexcuse!—Fehleisen shot billions of these chain microbes,now known as streptococci, into people hopelessly sickwith cancer. And in a few days each one of these human

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experimental animals of his flamed red with St. An-thony’s Fire—some collapsed dangerously and nearly died—and so this desperado proved his case: That streptococ-cus is the cause of erysipelas.

Another pupil of Koch was the now forgotten hero,Doctor Garre of Basel, who gravely rubbed whole test-tubes full of another kind of microbe—which Pasteur hadalleged was the cause of boils—into his own arm. Garrecame down horribly with an enormous carbuncle andtwenty boils—the tremendous dose of microbes he shotinto himself might easily have finished him—but he dis-missed his danger as merely “unpleasant” and shoutedtriumphantly: “I now know that this microbe, this sta-phylococcus, is the true cause of boils and carbuncles!”

Meanwhile, at the end of 1882, when Koch had fin-ished his virulent and partly comic wrangle with Pasteur,who was just then with prodigious enthusiasm saving thelives of sheep and cattle in France, the discoverer of thetubercle bacillus started sniffing along the trail of one ofthe most delicate, the most easy to kill, and yet the mostterribly savage of all microbes. In 1883 the Asiatic choleraknocked at the door of Europe. The cholera had stolenout of its lurking place in India and slipped mysteriouslyacross the sea and over desert sands to Egypt; suddenly amurderous epidemic of it exploded in Alexandria and Eu-rope across the Mediterranean was frightened. In Alexan-dria the streets were still with fear; the murderous virus—no one had the slightest notion of what kind of an in-visible beast it was—this virus, I say, sneaked into healthymen in the morning, doubled them into knots of spasm-racked agony by afternoon, and put them to rest beyondthe reach of all pain by night.

Then a strange race started between Pasteur and Koch,

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which meant between France and Germany, to search outthe microbe of this cholera that flared threatening on thehorizon. Koch and Gaffky went armed with microscopesand a menagerie of animals from Berlin; Pasteur—whowas desperately busy struggling to conquer the mysteriousmicrobe of hydrophobia—sent the brilliant and devotedEmile Roux and the silent Thuillier, youngest of the mi-crobe hunters of Europe. Koch and Gaffky worked for-getting to eat or sleep; they toiled in dreadful rooms cut-ting up the bodies of Egyptians dead of cholera; in theirmuggy laboratory with the air fairly dripping with asteamy heat, sweat dropping off the ends of their noseson to the lenses of their microscopes, they shot stuff fromthe tragic carcasses of just-dead Alexandrians into apesand dogs and hens and mice and cats. But while theserival teams of searchers hunted frantically the epidemicbegan to fade away as mysteriously as it came. None ofthem 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 saw death receding, their chance oftrapping their prey slipping from them.

Koch and Gaffky were getting ready to return to Ber-lin, when one morning a frightened messenger came tothem and told them: “Dr. Thuillier, of the French Com-mission, is dead—of cholera.”

Koch and Pasteur hated each other sincerely and enthu-siastically, like the good patriots that they were, but nowthe two Germans went to the bereaved Roux and offeredtheir help and their condolences; and Koch was one ofthose that carried in a plain box to its last home the bodyof Thuillier, this daring young Thuillier whom the miser-ably weak—but treacherous—cholera microbe had turnedupon and done to death before he had ever had a chance

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to spy upon and trap it. At the grave Koch laid wreathsupon the coffin: “They are very simple,” he said, “but theyare of laurel, such as are given to the brave.”

The funeral of this first of the martyred microbe hunt-ers over, Koch hurried back to Berlin with certain mysteri-ous boxes that held specimens, that he had painted withpowerful dyes, and these specimens had in them a curiousmicrobe shaped like a comma. Koch made his report tothe Minister of State: “I have found a germ,” he said, “inall cases of cholera . . . but I haven’t proved yet that it isthe cause. Send me to India where cholera is alwayssmoldering—what I have found justifies your sending methere.”

So Koch sailed from Berlin for Calcutta, with the fateof Thuillier hanging over him, drolly chaperoning fiftymice and dreadfully annoyed by seasickness. I have oftenwondered what his fellow-passengers took him for—prob-ably they guessed that he was some earnest little mission-ary or a serious professor intent to delve into ancientHindu lore.

Koch found his comma bacillus in the dead bodies ofevery one of the forty carcasses into which he peered, andhe unearthed the same microbe in the intestines of pa-tients at the moment the fatal disease hit them. But henever found this germ in any of the hundreds of healthyHindus that he examined, nor in any animal, from miceto elephants.

Quickly Koch learned to grow the comma bacillus pureon beef-broth jelly, and once he had it imprisoned in histubes he studied all the habits of this vicious little vege-table, how it perished quickly when he dried it the leastbit, how it could sneak into a healthy man by way of thesoiled linen of patients that had died. He dredged thiscomma microbe up out of the stinking water of the tanks

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around which clustered the miserable Hindu’s huts—sadhovels from which drifted the moans of helpless ones thatwere dying of cholera.

At last Koch sailed back to Germany, and here he wasreceived like some returning victorious general. “Choleranever rises spontaneously,” he told his audience of learneddoctors; “no healthy man can ever be attacked by choleraunless he swallows the comma microbe, and this germcan only develop from its like—it cannot be producedfrom any other thing, or out of nothing. And it is onlyin the intestine of man, or in highly polluted water likethat of India that it can grow.”

It is thanks to these bold searchings of Robert Kochthat Europe and America no longer dread the devastatingraids of these puny but terrible little murderers from theOrient—and their complete extermination from the worldwaits only upon the civilization and sanitation ofIndia. . . .

VIII

From the German Emperor’s own hand Koch now re-ceived the Order of the Crown, with Star, but in spite ofthat his countrified hat continued to fit his stubbly head,and when admirers adored him he only said to them: “Ihave worked as hard as I could ... if my success hasbeen greater than that of most . . . the reason is that Icame in my wanderings through the medical field uponregions where the gold was still lying by the wayside . . .and that is no great merit.”

The hunters who believed that microbes were the chieffoes of man, these men were brave, but there was carelessheroism too among some of the ancient doctors and old-fogey sanitarians who thought that all this new stuffabout microbes was claptrap and nonsense. Old Professor

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Pettenkofer of Munich was ihe leader of the skeptics whowere not convinced by Koch’s clear experiments, andwhen Koch came back from India with those commabacilli that he was sure were the authors of cholera Pei-tenkofer wrote him something like this: “Send me someof your so-called cholera germs, and I’ll show you howharmless they are!”

Koch sent him on a tube that swarmed with wee viru-lent comma microbes. And so Pettenkofcr—to the greatalarm of all good microbe hunters—swallowed the entirecontents of the tube. There were enough billions of wig-gling comma germs in this tube to infect a regiment.Then he growled his scorn through his magnificent beard,and said: “Now let us see if I get cholera!” Mysteriously,nothing happened, and the failure of the mad Pettenkoferto come down with cholera remains to this day an enigma,without even the beginning of an explanation.

Pettenkofer, who was foolhardy enough to try such apossibly suicidal experiment, was also sufficiently cocksureto believe that his drinking of the cholera soup had settledthe question in his favor. “Germs are of no account incholera!” shouted the old doctor. “The important thing isthe 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 allegedfatal bacilli, and have not even had a cramp in my stom-ach!” 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 Kochwas right when he said that people can never have cholerawithout swallowing his comma bacillus. And the yearsi£iat have gone by have revealed that Pettenkofer’s experi-

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ment pointed out a mystery behind 'the curtains of the un-known, and these obscuring draperies have not now evenbegun to be lifted by modern microbe hunters. Murder-ous germs are everywhere, sneaking into all of us, yet theyare able to assassinate only some of us, and that questionof the strange resistance of the rest of us is still just asmuch an unsolved puzzle as it was in those days of theroaring eighteen-eighties when men were ready to risk dy-ing to prove that they were right.

For, make no mistake, Pettcnkofer walked within aninch of death; other microbe hunters have since then swal-lowed cultures of virulent cholera microbes by accident—and died horribly.

But we come to the end of the great days of RobertKoch, and the exploits of Louis Pasteur begin once moreto push Koch and all other microbe hunters into thebackground of the world’s attention. Let us leave Kochwhile 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 ofthe microbes that murder animals and men with anthraxand cholera and tuberculosis. But before you read the per-fect and brilliant finale of the gorgeous career of Pasteur,I beg leave to remove my hat and make bows of respectto Koch—the man who really proved that microbes areour most deadly enemies, who brought microbe huntingnear to being a science, the man who is now the partlyforgotten captain of an obscure heroic age.

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CHAPTER V

PASTEURAnd The Mad Dog

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Do cot think for a moment that Pasteur allowed hisfame and name to be forgotten in the excitement kickedup by the sensational proofs of Koch that microbes mur-der men. It is certain that less of a hound for sniffing outmicrobes, less of a poet, less of a master at keeping peoplewide-eyed with their mouths open, would have been shovedoff into a fairly complete oblivion by such events—but notPasteur!

It was in the late eighteen-seventies—Koch had justswept the German doctors off their feet by his fine discov-ery of the spores of anthrax—that Pasteur who was only achemist, had the effrontery to dismiss with a grunt, ashrug, and a wave of his hand, the ten thousand years ofexperience of doctors in studying and fighting diseases. Atthis time, in spite of Semmelweis, the Austrian who hadproved child-bed fever was contagious, the Lying-In hospi-tals of Paris were pest-holes. Out of every nineteenwomen who went hopeful into their doors, one was sureto die of child-bed fever, to leave her baby motherless. Oneof these places, where ten young mothers perished in succes-sion, was called the House of Crime. Women hardlydared to trust themselves to the most expensive physicians;they were beginning to boycott the hospitals. Large num-bers of them—with reason—no longer cared to risk thegrim danger of having babies. Even the doctors them-selves—accustomed though they were helplessly but sympa-

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thetically to preside at the demise of their patients—eventhe physicians themselves, I say, were scandalized at thisdreadful presence of death at the birth of new life.

One day, at the Academy of Medicine in Paris, a fa-mous physician was holding an oration, with plenty oflong Greek and elegant Latin words, on the cause—alas,completely unknown to him—of child-bed fever. Sud-denly one of his learned and stately sentences was inter-rupted by a voice bellowing from the rear of the hall:

“The thing that kills women with child-bed fever—itisn’t anything like that! It is you doctors that carrydeadly microbes from sick women to healthy ones ... !”It was Pasteur who said this; he was out of his seat; hiseyes flamed excitement.

“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 blackboard, grabbed a piece of chalk andshouted to the annoyed orator and the scandalized Acad'emy:

“You say I will not find the microbe? Man, I havefound it! Here’s the way it looks!” And Pasteur scrawleda chain of little circles on the blackboard. The meetingbroke up in confusion.

Pasteur was in his late fifties now, but he was still asimpetuous and enthusiastic as he had been at twenty-five.He had been a chemist and an expert on beet-sugar fer-mentations, he had shown the vintners how to keeptheir wines from spoiling, he had rushed from this jobinto the saving of sick silkworms, he had preached theslogan of Better Beer for France and had really madethe French beer better; but during all these hectic yearswhile he was doing the life work of a dozen men Pas-

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teur dreamed about the tracking down of microbes thathe knew must be the scourges of the human race, the au-thors of disease.

Then suddenly he found Koch had done the trickahead of him. He must catch up with this Koch. “Mi-crobes are in a way mine—I was the first to show howimportant they were, twenty years ago, when Koch was achild . . .” you can imagine Pasteur muttering. But therewere difficulties in the way of his catching up.

In the first place, Pasteur had never felt a pulse or tolda bilious man to stick out his tongue; it is doubtful if hecould have told a lung from a liver, and it is certain thathe did not know the first thing about how to hold ascalpel. As for those cursed hospitals—phew! The smell ofthem gave him nasty feelings at the pit of his stomach,and he wanted to stop his ears and run away from themoans that floated down their dingy corridors. But pres-ently—it was ever the way with this unconquerable man—he got around his medical ignorance. Three physicians,Joubert at first, and then Roux and Chamberland becamehis assistants; youngsters they were, these three, radicalswho were Bolshevik against ancient idiotic medical doc-trines. They sat worshiping Pasteur at his unpopular lec-tures in the Academy of Medicine, believing every one ofhis laughed-at prophecies of dreadful scourges caused bysub-visible bugs. He took these boys into his laboratoryand in return they explained the machinery of animals’ in-sides to Pasteur, they taught him the difference betweenthe needle and the plunger of a hypodermic syringe andconvinced him—he was very squeamish about such things—that animals like guinea-pigs and rabbits hardly felt theprick of the syringe needle when he injected them. Pri-vately these three men swore to be his slaves—and thepriests of this new science. . . .

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Nothing is truer than that there is no one orthodox wayof hunting microbes, and the differences between the waysKoch and Pasteur went at their work are the best illus-trations of this. Koch was as coldly logical as a text-bookof geometry—he searched out his bacillus of tuberculosiswith systematic experiments, and he thought of all the ob-jections that doubters might make before such doubtersknew that there was anything to have doubts about. Kochalways recited his failures with just as much and no moreenthusiasm than he did his triumphs. There was some-thing inhumanly just and right about him and helooked at his own discoveries as ir they had been those ofanother man of whom he was a little over-critical. ButPasteur! This man was a passionate groper whose headwas incessantly inventing right theories and wrong guesses—shooting them out like a display of village fireworks go-ing off bewilderingly by accident.

Pasteur started hunting microbes of disease and punchedinto a boil on the back of the neck of one of his assistantsand grew a germ from it and was sure it was the causeof boils; he hurried from these experiments to the hos-pital to find his chain microbes in the bodies of womendying with child-bed fever; from here he rushed out intcthe country to discover—but not to prove it precisely—that earthworms carry anthrax bacilli from the deep bur-ied carcasses of cattle to the surface of the fields. He wasa strange genius who seemed to need the energetic, gusto-ish doing of a dozen things at the same time—more orless accurately—in order to discover that grain of truthwhich lies at the bottom of most of his work.

In this variety of simultaneous goings-on you can fairlyfeel Pasteur fumbling at a way of getting ahead of KochKoch had shown with beautiful clearness that germvcause disease, there is no doubt about that—but this isn’t

the most important thing to do . . . this is nothing, thisproof, the thing to do is to find a way to prevent thegerms from killing people, to protect mankind fromdeath! “What impossible, what absurd experiments didn’twe discuss,” said Roux long after this distressing timewhen Pasteur was stumbling about in the dark. “Wewould laugh at them ourselves, next day.”

To understand Pasteur, it is important to know hiswild stabs and his failures as well as his triumphs. Hehad not the precise methods of growing microbes pure—it took the patience of Koch to devise such things—andone day to his disgust, Pasteur observed that a bottle ofboiled urine in which he had planted anthrax bacilli wasswarming with unbidden guests, contaminating microbesof the air that had sneaked in. The following morninghe observed that there were no anthrax germs left at all;they had been completely choked out by the bacilli fromthe air.

At once Pasteur jumped to a fine idea: “If the harmlessbugs from the air choke out the anthrax bacilli in thebottle, they will do it in the body too! It is a kind ofdog-eat-dog!” shouted Pasteur, and at once he put Rouxand Chamberland to work on the fantastic experiment ofgiving guinea-pigs anthrax and then shooting doses of bil-lions of harmless microbes into them—beneficent germswhich were to chase the anthrax bacilli round the bodyand devour them—they were to be like the mongoosewhich kills cobras. . . .

Pasteur gravely announced: “That there were highhopes for the cure of disease from this experiment,” butthat is the last you hear of it, for Pasteur was never a manto give the world of science the benefit of studying hisfailures. But a little later the Academy of Sciences senthim on a queer errand, and on this mission he stumbled

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across a fact that gave him the first clew to a genuine, aremarkable way of turning savage microbes into friendlyones. It was an outlandish plan he began* to devise, todream about, of turning living microbes of disease againsttheir own kind, so guarding animals and men from in-visible deaths. At this time there was a great to-do abouta cure for anthrax, invented by the horse doctor, Louvrier,in the Jura mountains in the east of France. Louvrier hadcured hundreds of cows who were at death’s door, saidthe influential men of the district: it was time that thistreatment received scientific approval.

Pasteur arrived there, escorted by his young assistants,and found that this miraculous cure consisted first, in hav-ing several farm hands rub the sick cow violently tomake her as hot as possible; then long gashes were cut inthe poor beast’s skin and into these cuts Louvrier pouredturpentine; finally the now bellowing and deplorably mal-treated cow was covered—excepting her face!—with aninch thick layer of unmentionable stuff soaked in hot vin-egar. This ointment was kept on the animal—who nowdoubtless wished she were dead—by a cloth that coveredher entire body.

Pasteur said to Louvrier: “Let us make an experiment.All cows attacked by anthrax do not die, some of themjust get better by themselves; there is only one way to findout, Doctor Louvrier, whether or no it is your treatmentthat saves them.”

So four good healthy cows were brought, and Pasteur inthe presence of Louvrier and a solemn commission ofarmers, shot a powerful dose of virulent anthrax microbninto the shoulder of each one of these beasts: this sa*swould have surely killed a sheep, it was enough to

death a few dozen guinea-pigs. The next day Pasteur andthe commission and Louvrier returned, and all the cow*had large feverish swellings on their shoulders, their breathcame in snorts—they were in a bad way, that was veryevident.

“Now, Doctor,” said Pasteur, “choose two of these sickcows—we’ll call them A and B. Give them your new cure,and we’ll leave cows C and D without any treatment atall.” So Louvrier assaulted poor A and B with his villain-ous treatment. The result was a terrible blow to the sin-cere would-be curer of cows, for one of the cows thatLouvrier treated got better—but the other perished; andone 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 cowsA and D instead of A and B—we all would have thoughtyou had really found a sovereign remedy for anthrax.”

Here were two cows left over from the experiment, beaststhat had had a hard siege of anthrax and got better fromit: “What shall I do with these two cows?” pondered Pas-teur. “Well, I might try shooting a still more savage strainof anthrax bacilli into them—I have one family of anthraxgerms in Paris that would give even a rhinoceros a badnight.”

So Pasteur sent to Paris for his vicious cultivation, andinjected five drops into the shoulders of those two cowsthat had got better. Then he waited, but nothing happenedto the beasts, not even a tiny swelling at the point wherehe had injected millions of poisonous bacilli; the cows re-mained perfectly happy!

Then Pasteur jumped to one of his quick conclusions:“Once a cow has anthrax, but gets better from it, all theanthrax microbes in the world cannot give her another

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attack—she is immune ” This thought began playing andflitting about in his head and made him wool-gather sothat he did not hear questions that Madame Pasteur askedhim, nor see obvious things at which his eyes lookeddirectly.

“How to give an animal a little attack of anthrax, a safelittle attack that won’t kill him, but will surely protecthim. . . . There must be a way to do that. ... I mustfind a way.”

So it went with Pasteur for months and he kept sayingto Roux and Chamberland: “What mystery is there, likethe mystery of the non-recurrence of virulent maladies?”He went about muttering to himself: “We must im-munize—we must immunize against microbes. . . .”

Meanwhile Pasteur and his faithful crew were trainingtheir microscopes on stuff from men and animals dead ofa dozen different diseases; there was a kind of mixed upfumbling in this work between 1878 and 1S80—when oneday fate, or God, put a marvelous way to immunize rightunder Pasteur’s lucky nose. (It is hard for me to give youthis story exactly straight because all of the various peoplewho have written about Pasteur tell it differently and Pas-teur himself in his scientific paper says nothing whateverabout this remarkable discovery having been a happy acci-dent.) But here it is, as well as I can do, with certain gapsthat I have had to fill in myself.

In 1880, Pasteur was playing with the very tiny microbethat kills chickens with a malady known as chicken cholera.Doctor Perongito had discovered this microbe, so tinythat it was hardly more than a quivering point before thestrongest lens. Pasteur was the first microbe hunter togrow it pure, in a soup that he cooked for it from chickenmeat. And after he had watched these dancing pointsmultiply into millions in a few hours, he let fall the small-

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est part of a drop of this bug-swarming broth onto a crumbof bread—and fed this bread to a chicken. In a few hoursthe unfortunate beast stopped clucking and refused to eat,her feathers ruffled until she looked like a fluffy ball, andthe next day Pasteur came in to find the bird tottering, itseyes shut in a kind of invincible drowsiness that turnedquickly into death.

Roux and Chamberland nursed these terrible wee mi-crobes along carefully; day after day they dipped a cleanplatinum needle into a bottle of chicken broth that teemedwith germs and then carefully shook the same still-wetneedle into a fresh flask of soup that held no microbe at all—so day after day these transplantations went on—alwayswith new myriads of germs growing from the few that hadcome in on the moistened needle. The benches of the labora-tory became cluttered with abandoned cultures, some ofthem weeks old. “We’ll have to clean this mess up to-mor-row,” thought Pasteur.

Then the god of good accidents whispered in his ear, andPasteur said to Roux: “We know the chicken cholera mi-crobes are still alive in this bottle . . . they’re several weeksold, it is true . . . but just try shooting a few drops ofthis old cultivation into some chickens. . . .”

Roux followed these directions and the chickens promptlygot sick, turned drowsy, lost their customary lively trivo*lousness. But next morning, when Pasteur came into thelaboratory looking for these birds, to put them on the post'mortem board—he was sure they would be dead—he foundthem perfectly happy and gay!

“This is strange,” pondered Pasteur, “always before thisthe microbes from our cultivations have killed twentychickens out of twenty. . . .” But the time for his discov-ery was not yet, and next day, after these strangely re-covered chickens had been put in charge of the caretaker,

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Pasteur and his family and Roux and Chambcrland wentoff on their summer vacations. They forgot about thosebirds. . . .

But at last one day Pasteur told the laboratory servant:“Bring up some healthy birds, new chickens, and get themready for inoculation.”

“But we only have a couple of unused chickens left, Mr.Pasteur—remember, you used the last ones before you wentaway—you injected the old cultures into them, and theygot sick but didn’t die?”

Pasteur made a few appropriate remarks about servantswho neglected to keep a good supply of fresh chickens onhand. “Well, all right, bring up what new chickens youhave 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 assistantshot the soup with its myriads of germs into the breastmuscles of the chickens—into the new ones, and into theones that had got better! Roux and Chamberland cameinto the laboratory next morning—Pasteur was always therean hour or so ahead of them—they heard the muffledvoice of their master shouting to them from the animalroom below stairs:

“Roux, Chamberland, come down here—hurry!”

They found him pacing up and down before the chickencages. “Look!” said Pasteur. “The new birds we shot yes-terday—they’re dead all right, as they ought to be. . . . Butnow see these chickens that recovered after we shot themwith the old cultures last month. . . . They got the samemurderous dose yesterday—but look at them—they haveresisted the virulent dose perfectly . . . they are gay • . .they are eating!”

Roux and Chamberland were puzzled for a moment.

Then Pasteur raved: “But don’t you see what this means?

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Everything is found I Now I have found out how to makea beast a little sick—just a little sick so that he will getbetter, from a disease. . . . All we have to do is to let ourvirulent microbes grow old in their bottles . . . instead ofplanting them in to new ones every day. . . . When themicrobes age, they get tame . . . they give the chicken thedisease . . . but only a little of it . . . and when she getsbetter she can stand all the vicious virulent microbes in theworld. . . . This is our chance—this is my most lemarkablediscovery—this is a vaccine I’ve discovered, much more sure,more scientific than the one for smallpox where no one hasseen the germ. . . . We’ll apply this to anthrax too ... toall virulent diseases. ... We will save lives . . . !”

hi

A lesser man than Pasteur might have done this sameaccidental experiment—for this was no test planned by thehuman brain—a lesser man might have done it and wouldhave spent years trying to explain to himself the mysteryof it, but Pasteur, stumbling on this chance protection of acouple of miserable chickens, saw at once a new way ofguarding living things against virulent germs, of savingmen from death. His brain jumped to a new way of trick-ing the hitherto inexorable God who ruled that men mustbe helpless before the sneaking attacks of his sub-visibleenemies. . . .

Pasteur was ^fifty-eight years old now, he was past hisprime, but with this chance discovery of the vaccine thatsaved chickens from cholera, he started the six most hecticyears of his life, years of appalling arguments and unhoped-for triumphs and terrible disappointments—into these years,in short, he poured the energy and the events of the livesof a hundred ordinary men.

Hurriedly Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland set out

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to confirm the first chance observation they had made.They let virulent chicken cholera microbes grow old intheir bottles of broth; they inoculated these enfeebled bugsinto dozens of healthy chickens—which promptly gotsick, but as quickly recovered. Then triumphantly, a fewdays later, they watched these birds—these vaccinated chick-ens—tolerate murderous injections of millions of microbes,enough to kill a dozen new birds who were not immune.

So it was that Pasteur, ingeniously, turned microbesagainst themselves. He tamed them first, and then hestrangely used them for wonderful protective weaponsagainst the assaults of their own kind.

And now Pasteur, with his characteristic impetuousness—after all it was only chickens he had learned to guard fromdeath so far—became more arrogant than ever with theold-fashioned doctors who talked Latin words and wroteshot-gun prescriptions. He went to a meeting of the Acad-emy of Medicine and with complaisance told the doctorshow his chicken vaccinations were a great advance on theimmortal smallpox discovery of Jenner: “In this case Ihave demonstrated a thing that Jenner never could do insmallpox—and that is, that the microbe that kills is thesame one that guards the animal from death!”

The old-fashioned blue-coated doctors were peeved atPasteur’s appointing himself a god superior to the greatJenner; Doctor Jules Guerin, the famous surgeon, becameparticularly sarcastic about Pasteur making so much ofmere fussings with chickens—and the fight was on. Pas-teur, in a fury got up and shouted remarks about the utternonsensicality of one of Guerin’s pet operations, and thereoccurred a most scandalous scene—it embarrasses me tohave to tell about it—a strange shambles in which Guerin,who was past eighty, rose from his seat and was about tofall on the sixty-year-old Pasteur. The old man aimed a

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wallop at Pasteur, bur frantic friends jumped in and pre-vented the impending fisticuffs of these two men whothought they could settle the truth by kicks and blowsand mayhem.

Next day the ancient Guerin sent his seconds to Pasteurwith a challenge to a duel, but Pasteur, evidently, did notcare to risk dying that way and he sent Guerin’s friends tothe Secretary of the Academy with this message: “I amready, having no right to act otherwise, to modify whateverthe editors may consider as going beyond the rights ofcriticism and legitimate defense.” And so Pasteur once moreproved himself to be a human being—if not what is com-monly called a man—by backing out of the fight.

As I have told you before, Pasteur had a great deal of themystic in him. Often he bowed himself down before thatmysterious Infinite—he worshiped the Infinite when he wasnot clutching at it like a baby reaching for the moon; butfrequently, the moment one of his beautiful experimentshad knocked another little chunk off that surrounding Un-known, he made the mistake of believing that all mysterieshad dissolved away. It was so now—when he saw that hecould really protect chickens perfectly against a fatal illnessby his amazing trick of sticking a few of their own tamedassassins into them. At once Pasteur guessed: “Maybe thesefowl-cholera microbes will guard chickens against othervirulent diseases!” and promptly he inoculated some henswith his new vaccine of weakened fowl cholera germs andthen injected them with some certainly murderous anthraxbacilli—and the chickens did not die!

Wildly excited he wrote to Dumas, his old professor, andhinted that the new fowl-cholera vaccine might be a won-derful Pan-Protector against all kinds of virulent maladies.“If this is confirmed,” he wrote, “we can hope for themost important consequences, even in human maladies.”

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Old Dumas, greatly thrilled, had this letter published inthe Reports of-the Academy of Sciences, and there it stands,a sad monument to Pasteur’s impetuousness, a blot on hisrecord of reporting nothing but facts. So far as I canfind, Pasteur never retracted this error, although he soonfound that a vaccine made from one kind of bacillus doesnot protect an animal against all diseases, but only—andthen not absolutely surely—against the one disease of whichthe microbe in the vaccine is the cause.

But one of Pasteur’s most charming traits was his char-acteristic of a scientific Phoenix, who rose triumphantlyfrom the ashes of his own mistakes. When his imaginationcarried him into the clouds you find him presently landingon the ground with a bump—making clever experimentsagain, digging for good true hard facts. So it is not sur-prising to find him, with Roux and Chamberland, in 1881,discovering a very pretty way of taming vicious anthraxmicrobes and turning them into a vaccine. By this timethe quest after vaccines had become so violent that Rouxand Chamberland hardly had their Sundays off, and neverwent on vacations; they slept at the laboratory to be neartheir tubes and microscopes and microbes. And here, Pas-teur directing them, they delicately weakened anthraxbacilli so that some killed guinea-pigs, but not rabbits, andothers did mice to death, but were too weak to harmguinea-pigs. They shot the weaker and then the strongermicrobes into sheep, who got a little sick but then recov-ered, and after that these sheep could stand, apparently, theassaults of vicious anthrax germs that were able to killeven a cow.

At once Pasteur told this new triumph to the Academyof Sciences—he had left off going to the Academy of Medi-cine after his brawl with Guerin—and he held out purplehopes to them that he would presently invent ingenious

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vaccines that would wipe out all diseases from mumps tomalaria. “What is more easy,” he shouted, “than to findin these successive viruses a vaccine capable of making sheepand cows and horses a little sick with anthrax withoutletting them perish—and so preserving them from subse-quent maladies?” Some of Pasteur’s colleagues thought hewas a little cocksure about this, and they ventured to pro-test. Pasteur’s veins stood out on his forehead, but hemanaged to keep his mouth shut until he and Roux wereon the way home, when he burst out, speaking really ofall people who failed to see the absolute truth of his idea:

“I would not be surprised if such a man were to becaught beating his wife!”

Make no mistake—science was no cool collecting of factsfor Pasteur; in him it set going the same kind of machinerythat stirs the human animal to tears at the death of a babyand makes him sing when he hears his uncle has died andleft him five hundred thousand dollars.

But enemies were on Pasteur’s trail again. Just as hewas always stepping on the toes of physicians, so he hadoffended the high and useful profession of the horse doctors,and one of the leading horse doctors, the editor of one ofthe most important journals of horse doctoring, his namewas Doctor Rossignol, cooked up a plot to lure Pasteur in-to a dangerous public experiment and so destroy him. ThisRossignol got up with a great show of scientific fairnessat the Agricultural Society of Melun and said:

“Pasteur claims that nothing is easier than to make avaccine that will protect sheep and cows absolutely fromanthrax. If that is true, it would be a great thing forFrench farmers, who are now losing twenty million francsa year from this disease. Well, if Pasteur can really makesuch magic stuff, he ought to be willing to prove to us*hat he has the goods. Let us get Pasteur to consent to a

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grand public experiment; li he is right, we farmers andveterinarians are the gainers—if it fails, Pasteur will have tostop his eternal blabbing about great discoveries that savesheep and worms and babies and hippopotamuses!” Likethis 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 dis-tinguished old Baron de la Rochette was sent to flatterPasteur into this dangerous experiment.

But Pasteur was not one bit suspicious. “Of course Iam willing to demonstrate to your society that my vaccineis a life-saver—what will work in the laboratory on four-teen sheep will work on sixty at Melun!”

That was the great thing about Pasteur! When he pre-pared to take the rabbit out of the hat, to astonish theworld, he was absolutely sincere about it; he was a magni-ficent showman and not below some small occasionalhocus-pocus, but he was no designing mountebank. And"he public test was set for May and June, that year.

Roux and Chamberland—who had begun to see animalsthat were strange combinations of chickens and guinea-pigsin their dreams, to drop important flasks, to lie awake in-jecting millions of imaginary guinea-pigs, these fagged-outboys had just started off on a vacation to the country—when they received telegrams that brought them back totheir exciting treadmill:

COME BACK PARIS AT ONCE ABOUT TO MAKEPUBLIC DEMONSTRATION THAT OUR VACCINEWILL PROTECT SHEEP AGAINST ANTHRAX—L.PASTEUR.

Something like that read these wires.

They hurried back. Pasteur said to them: “Before theAgricultural Society of Melun, at the farm of Pouilly-le-Fort, I am going to vaccinate twenty-four sheep, one goat

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and severai cattle—twenty-four other sheep, one goat andseveral other cattle are going to be left without inoculation—then, at the appointed time, I am going to inject all ofthe beasts with the most deadly virulent culture of an-thrax bacilli that we have. The vaccinated animals will beperfectly protected—the not-vaccinated ones will die in twodays of course.” Pasteur sounded as confident as an astron-omer predicting an eclipse of the sun. . .

“But, master, you know this work is so delicate—wecannot be absolutely sure of our vaccines—they may kill

some of the sheep we try to pro'ccf ”

“WHAT WORKED WITH FOURTEEN SHEEP IN

OUR LABORATORY WILL, WORK WITH FIFTY AT#

MELUN!” Pasteur roarc^ at them. For him just then,there was no such thing as a mysterious, tricky nature, anunknown full of failures and surprises—the misty Infinitewas as simple as two plus two makes four to him justthen. So there was nothing for Roux and Chamberland todo but to roll up their sleeves and get the vaccines ready.

The day for the first injections came at last. Theirbottles and syringes \ jre ready, their flasks were carefullylabeled—“Be sure not to mix up the first and second vac-cine, boys!” shouted Pasteur, full of a gay confidence, asthey left the Rue d’Ulm for the train. As they came onthe field at Pouilly-le-Fort, and strode toward the shedsthat held the forty-eight sheep, two goats and several cattle;Pasteur marched into the arena like a matador, and bowedseverely to the crowd. There were senators of the Republicthere, and scientists and horse doctors and dignitaries, andhundreds of farmers; and as Pasteur walked among themwith his little limp—it was however a sort of jaunty limp—they cheered him mightily, many of them, and some ofthem snickered.

And there was a flock of newspaper men there, including

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the now almost legendary de Blowitz, of the LondonTimes.

The sheep, fine healthy beasts, were herded into a clearspace; Roux and Chamberland lighted their alcohol lampsand gingerly unpacked their glass syringes and shot fivedrops of the first vaccine—the anthrax bacilli that wouldkill mice but leave guinea-pigs alive, into the thighs oftwenty-four of the sheep, one of the goats, and half of thecattle. The beasts got up and shook themselves and werelabeled by a little gouge munched out of their ears. Thenthe audience repaired n a’ shed where Pasteur haranguedthem for half an hour-^telling them simply but with akind of dramatic portentous**tss of these new vaccinationsand the hopes they held out foi 'differing men.

Twelve days went by and the show was repeated. Thecrowd was there once more and the second vaccine—thestronger one whose bacilli had the power of killing guinea-pigs but not rabbits—was injected, and the animals bore upbeautifully under it and scampered about as healthy sheep,goats and cattle should do. The time for the fatal finaltest drew near; the very air of the H 'ie laboratory becamefinicky; the taut workers snapped at each other across theBunsen flames. Pasteur was never so appallingly quiet—andthe bottle washers fairly jumped across the room to fill hisgrowled orders. Every day Thuillier, Pasteur’s new young-est assistant, went out to the farm to put his thermometercarefully under the tails of the inoculated animals to seeif they had fever—but thank God, every one of them wasstanding up beautifully under the heavy dose of the vac-cine that was not quite murderous enough to kill rabbits.

While the heads of Roux and Chamberland turned sev-eral hairs grayer, Pasteur kept his confidence, and he wrote,with his old charmingly candid opinion of himself: “Ifsuccess is complete, this will be one of the finest examples

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of applied science in this country, consecrating one of thegreatest and most fruitful discoveries.”

His friends shook their heads and lifted* their shouldersand murmured: “Napoleonic, my dear Pasteur,” and Pas-teur 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 thatwere vaccinated and those to which nothing whatever hadbeen done—all of these received a surely fatal dose of viru-lent anthrax bugs. Roux got down on his knees in thedirt, surrounded by his alcohol lamps and bottles of deadlyvirus, and awed the crowd by his cool flawless shooting ofthe poisonous stuff into the more than sixty animals.

With his whole scientific reputation trusted to this onedelicate test, realizing at last that he had done the bravebut terribly rash thing of letting a frivolous public judgehis science Pasteur rolled and tossed around in his bed andgot up fifty times that night. He said absolutely nothingwhen Madame Pasteur tried to encourage him and toldhim, “Now now everything will come out all right”; hesulked in and out of the laboratory; there is no record ofit, but without a doubt he prayed. . . .

Pasteur did not fancy going up in balloons and he wouldnot fight duels—but no one can question his absolute game-?ess when he let the horse doctors get him into this danger-ous test

The crowd that came to judge Pasteur on the famoussecond day of June, 1881, made the previous ones look likemere assemblages at country baseball games. General Coun-cilors were here to-day as well as senators; magnificoesturned out to see this show—tremendous dignitaries whoonly exhibited themselves to the public at the weddings

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and funerals of kings and princes. And the newspaper re-porters clustered around the famous de Blowitz.

At two o’clock Pasteur and his cohorts marched uponthe field and this time there were no snickers, but only amighty bellowing of hurrahs. Not one of the twenty-fourvaccinated sheep—though two days before millions of deadlygerms had taken residence under their hides—not one ofthese sheep, I say, had so much as a trace of fever. Theyate and frisked about as if they had never been within athousand 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 staggeringabout, at grips with that last inexorable, always victoriousenemy of all living things. Ominous black blood oozedfrom their mouths and noses.

“See! There goes another one of those sheep that Pasteurdid not vaccinate!” shouted an awed horse doctor.

v

The Bible does not go into details about what the greatwedding crowd thought of Jesus when he turned waterinto wine, but Pasteur, that second of June, was the im-presario of a modern miracle as amazing as any of the mar-vels wrought by the Man of Galilee, and that day Pas-teur’s whole audience—who many of them had beensnickering skeptics—bowed down before this excitable littlehalf-paralyzed man who could so perfectly protect livingcreatures from the deadly stings of sub-visible invaders. Tome this beautiful experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort is an utterlystrange event in the history of man’s fight against relentlessnature. There is no record of Prometheus bringing theprecious fire to mankind amid applause; Galileo was actu-ally clapped in prison for those searchings that have done

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more than any other to transform the world. We do noteven know the names of those completely anonymousgeniuses who first built the wheel and invented sails andthought to tame a horse.

VI

But here stood Louis Pasteur, while his twenty-four im-mune sheep scampered about among the carcasses of thesame number of pitiful dead ones, here stood this man, Isay, in a gruesomely gorgeous stage-setting of an immortaldrama, and all the world was there to see and to recordand to be converted to his own faith in his passionate fightagainst needless death.

Now the experiment turned into the likeness of a revival.Doctor Biot, a healer in horses who had been one of themost sarcastic of the Pasteur-baitcrs, rushed up to him asthe last of the not-vaccinated sheep was dying, and cried:“Inoculate me with your vaccines, Mr. Pasteur—just asyou have done to those sheep you have saved so wonder-fully Then I will submit to the injection of the mur-

derous virus! All men must be convinced of this marvel-ous discovery!”

“It is true,” said another humbled enemy, “that I havemade jokes about microbes, but I am a repentant sinner!”

“Well, allow me to remind you of the words of theGospel,” Pasteur answered him. “Joy shall be in heavenover one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety andnine just persons that need no repentance.”

The great de Blowitz cheered and rushed off to file histelegram to the London Times and to the newspapers ofthe world: “The experiment at Pouilly-le-Fort is a perfect,an unprecedented success.”

The world received this news and waited, confusedly be-lieving that Pasteur was a kind of Messiah who was going

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to lift from men the burden of all suffering. France wentwild and called him her greatest son and conferred on himthe Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor. Agriculturalsocieties, horse doctors, poor farmers whose fields werecursed with the poisonous virus of anthrax—all these senttelegrams begging him for thousands of doses of the life-saving vaccine. And Pasteur, with Roux and Chamberlandand Thuillier, responded to them with a magnificent dis-regard of their own health—and of science. For Pasteur,poet that he was, had more faith than the wildest of hisnew converts in this experiment.

In answer to these telegrams Pasteur turned the little lab-oratory in the Rue d’Ulm into a vaccine factory—hugekettles bubbled and simmered with the broth in whichthe tame, the life-saving, anthrax bacilli were to grow.Delicately—but so frantically that it was not quite delicateenough—Roux and Chamberland worked at weakeningthe murderous bacilli just enough to make the sheep ofFrance a little sick, but not too sick from anthrax. Thenall of them sweat at pouring numerous gallons of this bacil-lus-swarming soup which was the vaccine, into little bottles,a few ounces to each bottle, into clean bottles that had tcbe absolutely free from all other germs. And they had todo this subtle job without any proper apparatus whatever.I marvel that Pasteur ever attempted it; surely there neverhas been such blind confidence raised by one clear—butLord! it might be simply a lucky—experiment.

In moments snatched from this making of vaccine Rouxand Chamberland and Thuillier scurried up and down theland of France, and even to Hungary. They inoculatedtwo hundred sheep in this place and five hundred andseventy-six in that—in less than a year hundreds of thou-sands of beasts had got this life-saving stuff. These wander-ing vaccinators would drag themselves back into the lab-

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oratory from their hard trips, they would get back to Parisprobably wanting to get a few drinks or spend an eveningwith a pretty girl or loaf over a pipe—but Pasteur couldnot stand the smell of tobacco smoke, and as for wine andwomen, were not the sheep of France literally baa-ing tobe saved? So these young men who were slaves of thisbattler whose one insane thought was “find-the-microbe-kill-the-microbe”—these faithful fellows took off their coatsand peered at anthrax bacilli through the microscopesuntil their eye rims got red and their eyelashes fell out. Inthe middle of this work—with the farmers of France yell-ing for more vaccine—they began to have strange troubles:contaminating germs that had no business there began topop up among the anthrax bacilli; all at once a weak vac-cine that should have just killed a mouse began to knockoff large rabbits. . . . Then, just as the scientific desperadoesgot these messes straightened out, Pasteur would come in,nagging at them, fuming, fussing because they took solong at their experiments.

He wanted to try to find the deadly virus of hydro-phobia.

And now at night the cluttering of the guinea-pigs andthe scurrying fights of the buck-rabbits in their cages weredrowned by the eerie noise of mad dogs howling—sinisterhowls that kept Roux and Chamberland and Thuillier fromsleep. . . . What would Pasteur ever have done—he surelywould never have got far in his fight with the messengersof death—without those fellows Roux and Chamberlandand Thuillier?

Gradually, it was hardly a year after the miracle ofPouilly-le-Fort, it began to be evident that Pasteur, thougha most original microbe hunter, was not an infallible God.Disturbing letters began to pile up on his desk; complaintsfrom Montpothier and a dozen towns of France, and from

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Packisch and Kapuvar in Hungary. Sheep were dying fromanthrax—not natural anthrax they had picked up in danger-ous fields, but anthrax they had got from those vaccinesthat were meant to save them! From other places camesinister stories of how the vaccine had failed to work—thevaccine had been paid for, whole flocks of sheep had beeninjected, the farmers had gone to bed breathing Thank-God-For-Our-Great-Man-Pasteur, only to wake up in the morn-ing to find their fields littered with the carcasses of deadsheep, and these sheep—which ought to have been immune—had died from the lurking anthrax spores that lay intheir fields. . . .

Pasteur began to hate to open his letters; he wanted tostop his ears against snickers that sounded from aroundcorners, and then—the worst thing that could possibly hap-pen—came a cold terribly exact scientific report from thelaboratory of that nasty little German Koch in Berlin, andthis report ripped the practicalness of the anthrax vaccineto tatters. Pasteur knew that Koch was the most accuratemicrobe hunter in the world.

There is no doubt that Pasteur lost some sleep from thisaftermath of his glorious discovery, but, God rest him, hewas a gallant man. It was not in him to admit, cither tothe public or to himself, that his sweeping claims werewrong.

“Have not I said that my vaccines made sheep a littlesick with anthrax, but never killed them, and protectedthem perfectly? Well, I must stick to that/" you can hearhim mutter between his teeth.

What a searcher this Pasteur was, and yet how little ofthat fine selfless candor of Socrates or Rabelais is to befound in him. But he is not in any way to be blamedfor that, for those two last were only, in their way, lookingfor truth, while Pasteur’s work carried him more and more

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into the frantic business of saving lives, and in this mattertruth is not of the first importance. . . .

In 1882, while his desk was loaded with reports ofdisasters, Pasteur went to Geneva, and there before thecream of disease-fighters of the world he gave a thrillingspeech, subject: “How to guard living creatures from viru-lent maladies by injecting them with weakened microbes.”Pasteur assured them that: “The general principles havebeen found and one cannot refuse to believe that the futureis rich with the greatest hopes.”

“We are all animated with a superior passion, the passionfor progress and for truth!” he shouted—but unhappily hesaid no word about those numerous occasions when hifvaccine had killed sheep instead of protecting them.

At this meeting Robert Koch sat blinking at Pasteurbehind his gold-rimmed spectacles and smiling under hisweedy beard at such an unscientific inspirational address.Pasteur seemed to feel something hanging over him, andhe challenged Koch to argue with him publicly—knowingthat Koch was a much better microbe hunter than anargufier. “I will content myself with replying to Mr. Pas-teur’s address in a written paper, in the near future,” saidKoch—who coughed, and sat down.

In a little while this reply appeared. It was dreadful. Inthis serio-comic answer Dr. Koch began by remarking thathe had obtained some of this precious so-called anthraxvaccine from the agent of Mr. Pasteur.

Did Mr. Pasteur say that his first vaccine would killmice, but not guinea-pigs? Dr. Koch had tested it, and itwouldn’t even kill mice. But some queer samples of it^killed sheep!

Did Mr. Pasteur maintain that his second vaccine killedguinea-pigs but not rabbits? Dr. Koch had carefully testedthis one too, and found that it often killed rabbits very

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promptly—and sometimes sheep, poor beasts! which Mr*Pasteur claimed it would guard from death.

Did Mr. Pasteur really believe that his vaccines werereally pure cultivations containing nothing but anthraxmicrobes? Dr. Koch had studied them carefully and foundthem to be veritable menageries of hideous scum-formingbacilli and strange cocci and other foreign creatures that hadno business there.

Finally, was Mr. Pasteur really burning so with a passionfor truth? Then why hadn’t he told of the bad results aswell as the good ones, that had followed the wholesale useof his vaccine?

“Such goings-on are perhaps suitable for the advertisingof a business house, but science should reject them vigor-ously,” finished Koch, drily, devastatingly.

Then Pasteur went through the roof and answered Koch’scool facts in an amazing paper with arguments that wouldnot have fooled the jury of a country debating society. DidKoch dare to make believe that Pasteur’s vaccines were fullof contaminating microbes? “For twenty years beforeKoch’s scientific birth in 1876, it has been my one occupationto isolate and grow microbes in a pure state, and thereforeKoch’s insinuation that I do not know how to make purecultivations cannot be taken seriously!” shouted Pasteur.

The French nation, even the great men of the nation,patriotically refused to believe that Koch had demotedtheir hero from the rank of God of Science—what couldyou expect from a German anyway?—and they promptlyelected Pasteur to the Acadimie Franqaise, the ultimatehonor .to bestow on a Frenchman. And on the day ofPasteur’s admission this fiery yes-man was welcomed to hisplace among the Immortal Forty by the skeptical genius,Ernest Renan, the author who had changed Jesus from aGod into a good human being, a man who could forgive

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everything because he understood everything. Renan knewthat even if Pasteur sometimes did suppress the truth, hewas still sufficiently marvelous. Renan was not a scientistbut he was wise enough to know that Pasteur had done awonderful thing when he showed that weak bugs mayprotect living beings against virulent ones—even if theywould not do it one hundred times out of one hundred.

Regard these two fantastically opposite men facing eachother on this solemn day. Pasteur the go-getter, an ener-getic fighter full of a mixture of faiths that interfered,sometimes, with ultimate—and maybe ugly—truth. Andtalking to him loftily sits the untroubled Renan with themassiveness of Mount Everest, such a dreadful skeptic thathe probably was never quite convinced that he was him-self alive, so firmly doubting the value of doing anythingthat he had become one of the fattest men in France.

Renan called Pasteur a genius and compared him tosome of the greatest men that ever lived and then gave theexcited, paralyzed, gray-haired, microbe hunter this mildadmonition:

“Truth, Sir, is a great coquette; she will not be soughtwith too much passion, but often is most amenable to in-difference. She escapes when apparently caught, but givesherself up if patiently waited for; revealing herself after fare-wells have been said, but inexorable when loved with toomuch fervor.”

Surely Renan was too wise to think that his lovely wordswould ever change Pasteur one jot from the headlonguntruthful hunter after truth that he was. But just thesame, these words sum up the fundamental sadnessPasteur's life, they tell of die crown of thorns that mad-men; gift| whose dream it is to change a world in this littlesevcidtf'years they are allowed to live.

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And now Pasteur began—God knows why—to stick littlehollow glass tubes into the gaping mouths of dogs writhingmad with rabies. While two servants pried apart and heldopen the jowls of a powerful bulldog, Pasteur stuck hisbeard within a couple of inches of those fangs whose snapmeant the worst of deaths, and, sprinkled sometimes witha maybe fatal spray, he sucked up the froth into his tube—to get a specimen in which to hunt for the microbe ofhydrophobia. I wish to forget, now, everything that I havesaid about his showmanship, his unsearcherlike go-gettings.This business of his gray eyes looking that bulldog in themouth—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 seriousdiseases, just then, whose microbes had not yet beenfound, diseases that killed many more people than rabieshad ever put to death, diseases that were not nearly sosurely deadly to an adventurous experimenter as rabieswould be—if one of those dogs should get loose.. . .

It must have been the artist, the poet in him that urgedhim on to this most hard and dangerous hunting, for Pas*teur himself said: “I have always been haunted by thevies of those victims of the mad wolf that came down the

Street of Arbois when I was a little boy...Pasteurfcngw the way the yells of a mad dog curdle the blood of

t$ery one. He remembered that less than a hundred yearsbefore in France, laws had to be passed against the poison*tag, the strangling, the shooting of wretched people whomifigk^md feljbw*townsmen just suspected of having mbien'Poglpeas ho'saw himself the deliverer of men fromeraa^'i^^uch hopeless suffering..

And then, in this most magnificent and truest of all hissearchings] Pasteur started out, as he so often did, by mak-ing mistakes. In the saliva of a little child dying fromhydrophobia he discovered a strange motionless germ thathe gave the unscientific name of “microbe-like-an-eightHe read papers at the Academy that hinted about thisfigure-eight germ having something to do with the mys-terious cause of hydrophobia. But in a little while thistrail proved to be a blind one, for with Roux and Chamber-land he found—after he had settled down and got his teethinto this search—that this eight-microbe could be found inthe mouths of many healthy people who had never beenanywhere near a mad dog.

Presently, late in 1882, he ran on to his first clew. “Maddogs are scarce just now, old Bourrel the veterinarian bringsme very few of them, and people with hydrophobia a^e stillharder to get hold of—we’ve got to produce this rabies inanimals in our laboratory and keep it going there—other-wise we won’t be able to go on studying it steadily,” hepondered.

He was more than sixty, and he was tired.

Then one day, a lassoed mad dog was brought into thelaboratory; dangerously he was slid into a big cage withhealthy dogs and allowed to bite them. Roux and Cham-berland fished froth out of the mouth of this mad beastand sucked it up into syringes and injected this stuff intorabbits and guinea-pigs. Then they waited eagerly to seethis menagerie develop the fiist signs of madness. Some-times—alas—the experiment worked, but other very irritat-ing times it did not; four healthy dogs had been bittenand six weeks later they came in one morning to find two‘of these creatures lashing about their cages, howling—butfor months after that the other two showed no sign of

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rabies; there was no rime or reason to this business, noregularity, confound it! this was not.science! And it wa*the same with the guinea-pigs and rabbits: two of the rab-bits might drag out their hind legs with a paralysis—thendie in dreadful convulsions, but the other four would goon chewing their greens as if there were no mad-dog viruswithin a million miles of them.

Then one day a little idea came to Pasteur, and hehurried to tell it to Roux.

“This rabies virus that gets into people by bites, it settlesin their brains and spinal cords. . . . All the symptomsof hydrophobia show that it’s the nervous system that thisvirus—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 withoutseeing it . . . maybe we could use the living animal’s braininstead of a bottle of soup ... a funny culture-bottle thatwould be, but. . . .

“When we inject it under the skin—the virus may getlost in the body before it can travel to the brain—if I couldonly stick it right into a dog’s brain . . . !”

Roux listened to these dreamings of Pasteur, he listenedbright-eyed to these fantastic imaginings. . . . Another manthan Roux might have thought Pasteur completely crazy.

. \ . The brain of a dog or rabbit instead of a bottle ofbroth, indeed! What nonsense! But not to Roux!

“But why not put the virus right into a dog’s brain,master, I can trephine a dog—I can drill a little hole inhis $kull—without hurting him—without damaging hisbrain 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 onhuman beings even, quite safely. “What! bore a hole right

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through a dog’s skull—why, you’d hurt the poor beastterribly . . . yoy would damage his brain . . . you wouldparalyze 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 themost marvelous of his gifts to men. He quailed before thestern experiment that his weird idea demanded. But Roux—the faithful, the now almost forgotten Roux—saved himby disobeying him.

For, a few days later when Pasteur left the laboratory togo to some meeting or other, Roux took a healthy dog,put him easily out of pain with a little chloroform, andbored a hole in the beast’s head and exposed his palpitat-ing, living brain. Then up into a syringe he drew a littlebit of the ground-up brain of a dog just dead with rabies:“This stuff must be swarming with those rabies microbesthat are maybe too small for us to see,” he pondered; andthrough the hole in the sleeping dog’s skull went theneedle of the syringe, and into the living brain Rouxslowly, gently shot the deadly rabid stuff. . . .

Next morning Roux told Pasteur about it “What!”

shouted Pasteur. “Where is the poor creature ... he mustbe dying . . . paralyzed. . .

But Roux was already down the stairs, and in an instanthe was back, his operated dog prancing in ahead of him,jumping gayly against Pasteur, sniffing ’round among theold broth bottles under the laboratory benches. Then Pas-teur realized Roux’s cleverness—and the new road of ex-periment that lay before him, and though he was not fondof dogs, his joy made him fuss over this one: “Good dog,excellent beast!” Pasteur said, and dreamed: “This beastwill show that my idea will work. . .

Sure enough, less than two weeks later the good creaturebegan to howl mournful cries and tear up his bed and

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gnaw at his cage—and in a few days more he' was dead,and this brute died, as you will see, so that thousands ofmankind might live.

✓ Now Pasteur and Roux and Chamberland had a sureway, 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 tinyfor the strongest microscope to show us—there’s no way togrow it in flasks of soup . . . but we can keep it alive—this deadly virus—in the brains of rabbits . . . that is theonly way to grow it,” you can hear Pasteur telling Rouxand Chamberland.

Never was there a more fantastic experiment in all ofmicrobe hunting, or in any science, for that matter; neverwas there a more unscientific feat of science than this strug-gling, by Pasteur and his boys, with a microbe they couldn’tsee—a weird bug of whose existence they only knew by itsinvisible growth in the living brains and spinal cords of anendless succession of rabbits and guinea-pigs and dogs.Their only knowledge that there was such a thing as themicrobe of rabies was the convulsive death of the rabbitsthey injected, and the fearful cries of their trephineddogs. . . .

Then Pasteur and his assistants started on their outland-ish—any wise man would say their impossible—adventureof taming this vicious virus that they could not see.There were little interruptions; Roux went with Thuillierto fight the cholera in Egypt and there, you will remember,Thuillier died; and Pasteur went out into the rural pig-stiesof France to discover the microbe and find a vaccine againsta disease that was just then murdering French swine. ButPasteur stopped getting entangled in those vulgar argu-ments which were so often to his discredit, and the threeof them locked themselves in their laboratory in the Rue

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d’Ulm with their poor paralyzed and dangerous animals.They sweat through endless experiments.

Pasteur mounted guard over his young men and kepttheir backs bent over their benches as if they were somehigher kind of galley slave. He watched their perilousexperiments with one eye and kept the other on the glassdoor of the workroom, and when he saw some of Roux’sand Chamberland’s friends approaching, to ask them maybeto come out for a glass of beer on the terrace of a near-bycafe, the master would hurry out and tell the interlopers:“No. No I 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 seemedto all of them that there was no possible way of weaken-ing the invisible virus of rabies. . . . One hundred animals,alas, out of every hundred that they injected—died. Youwould think that Roux and Chamberland, still youngsters,would have been the indomitable ones, the never-say-diemen of this desperate crew. But on the contrary!

“It’s no go, master,” said they, making limp waves oftheir 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 thinninggray hair seemed to stiffen: “Do the same experiment overagain—no matter if it failed last time—it may look foo)ishto you, but the important thing is not to leave the subject!”Pasteur shouted, in a fury. So it was that this man scoldedhis monkish disciples and prodded them to do useless testsover and over and over—with no reasons, with completelack of logic. With every fact against him Pasteur searchedand tried and failed and tried again with that insane neg-lect of common sense that sometimes turns hopeless cause'sinto victories.

indeed, wasn’t this setting out to tame the hydro-

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phobia virus—why wasn’t it a nonsensical wild-goose chase ?There was in all human history no single record of anyman or beast getting better from this horrible malady, oncethe symptoms had declared themselves, once the mysteriousmessengers of evil had wormed their unsc'en way into thespinal cord and brain. It was this kind of murderous stuffthat Pasteur and his men balanced on the tips of theirknives, sucked up into their glass pipettes within an inchfrom the lips—stuff that was separated from their mouthsby a thin little wisp of cotton. . . .

Then, one exciting day, the first sweet music of encour-agement came to these gropers in the dark—one of theirdogs inoculated with the surely fatal stuff from a rabidrabbit’s brain—this dog came down with his weird bark-ings and portentous shiverings and slatherings—and thenmiraculously got completely better! Excitedly, a few weekslater, they shot this first of all recovered beasts with adeadly virus, directly into his brain they injected the weemurderers. The little wound on his head healed quickly—anxiously Pasteur waited for his doomful symptoms to comeon him, but these signs never came. For months the dogromped 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, therewill be no recurrence. . . . We must find a way to tamethe virus now,” said Pasteur to his men, who agreed, butwere perfectly certain that there was no way to tame thatvirus.

But Pasteur began inventing experiments that no godwould have attempted; his desk was strewn with hiero-glyphic scrawls of them. And at eleven in the morning,when the records of the results of the day before had beencarefully put down, he would call Roux and Chamberland,and to them he would read off some wild plan for groping

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aftct this unseen unreachable virus-^some fantastic planfor getting his fingers on it inside the body of a rabbit—toweaken it.

“Try this experiment to-day I” Pasteur would tell them.

“But that is technically impossible!” they protested.

“No matter—plan it any way you wish, provided you doit well,” Pasteur replied. (He was, those days, like oldLudwig van Beethoven writing unplayable horn parts forbis symphonies—and then miraculously discovering horn-blowers to play those parts.) For, one way or another, theingenious Roux and Chamberland devised tricks to dothose crazy experiments. . . .

And at last they found a way of weakening the savagehydrophobia virus—by taking out a little section of thespinal cord of a rabbit dead of rabies, and hanging thisbit of deadly stuff up to dry in a germ-proof bottle forfourteen days. This shriveled bit of nervous tissue thathad once been so deadly they shot into the brains ofhealthy 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 senseor reason. “Now we’ll try drying other pieces of virulentstuff for twelve days—ten days—eight days—six days, andsee if we can’t just give our dogs a little rabies . . . thenthey ought to be immune. ...”

Savagely they fell to this long will o’ the wisp of an ex-periment. For fourteen days Pasteur walked up and downthe bottle and microscope and cage-strewn unearthly work-shop and grumbled and fretted and made scrawls in thateverlasting notebook of his. The first day the dogs weredosed with the weakened—the almost extinct virus thatbeen dried for fourteen days; the second day they re-gjved a shot of the slightly stronger nerve stuff that hadthirteen days in its bottle; and so on until the four-

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teenth day—when each beast was injected with one-day-dried virus that would have surely killed a not-inoculatedanimal.

For weeks they waited—hair graying again—for signs olrabies in these animals, but none ever came. They werehappy, these ghoulish fighters of death I Their clumsy ter-rible fourteen vaccinations had not hurt the dogs—but werethey immune?

Pasteur dreaded it—if this failed all of these years ofwork had gone for nothing, and “I am getting old, old . . .”you can hear him whispering to himself. But the test hadto be made. Would the dogs stand an injection of themost deadly rabid virus—right into their brains—a busi-ness that killed an ordinary dog one hundred times out ofone hundred?

Then one day Roux bored little holes through the skullsof two vaccinated dogs—and two not vaccinated ones: andinto all four went a heavy dose of the most virulentvirus. . . .

One month later, Pasteur and his men, at the end ofthree years of work, knew that victory over hydrophobiawas in their hands. For, while the two vaccinated dogsromped and sniffed about their cages with never a sign ofanything ailing them—the two that had not received thefourteen protective doses of dried rabbit’s brain—these twohad howled their last howls and died of rabies.

Now immediately—the life-saver in this man was al-ways downing the mere searcher—Pasteur’s head buzzedwith plans to wipe hydrophobia from the earth, he had ahundred foolish projects, and he walked in a brown worldof thought, in a mist of plans that Roux and Chamberland,and not even Madame Pasteur could penetrate. It was 1884,and when Pasteur forgot their wedding anniversary, thelong-suffering lady wrote to her daughter:

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“Your father is absorbed in his thoughts, talks little,bleeps little, rises at dawn, and, in one word, continues thelife I began with him this day thirty-five years ago.”

At first Pasteur thought of shooting his weakened rabiesvirus into all the dogs of France in one stupendous Napo-leonic series of injections: “We must remember that nohuman being is ever attacked with rabies except after beingbitten by a rabid dog. . . . Now if we wipe it out of dogswith our vaccine . . he suggested to the famous veterin-arian, Nocard, who laughed and shook his head.

“There arc more than a hundred thousand dogs andhounds and puppies in the city of Paris alone,” Nocardtold him, “and more than two million, five hundred thou-sand dogs in all of France—and if each of these bruteshad to get fourteen shots of your vaccine fourteen days ina row . . . where would you get the men? Where wouldyou get the time? Where the devil would you get therabbits? Where would you get sick spinal cord enough tomake one-thousandth enough vaccine?”

Then finally there dawned on Pasteur a simple way outof his trouble: “It’s not the dogs wc must give our four-teen doses of vaccine,he pondered, “it’s the human beingsthat have been bitten by mad dogs. . . .”

“How easy! . . . After a person has been bitten by a maddog, it is always weeks before the disease develops in him.

. . . The virus has to crawl all the way from the bite tothe brain. . . . While that is going on we can shoot in ourfourteen doses . . . and protect him!” and hurriedly Pas-teur called Roux and Chamberland together to try it oncne dogs first.

They put mad dogs in cages with healthy ones, and themad dogs bjt the normal ones.

. Roux injected virulent stuff from rabid rabbits into thejb^ins of other healthy dogs.

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Then they gave these beasts, certain to die if they wereleft alone—they shot' the fourteen stronger and strongerdoses of vaccine into them. It was an unheard-of triumph 1For every one of these creatures lived—threw oil perfectly,mysteriously, the attacks of their unseen assassins, and Pas-teur—who had had a bitter experience with his anthrax in-oculations—asked that all of his experiments be checkedby a commission of the best medical men of France, andat the end of these severe experiments the commission an-nounced :

“Once a dog is made immune with the gradually morevirulent spinal cords of rabbits dead of rabies, nothing onearth can give him the disease.”

From all over the world came letters, urgent telegrams,from physicians, from poor fathers and mothers who werewaiting terror-smitten for their children, mangled by maddogs, to die, frantic messages poured in on Pasteur, begginghim to send them his vaccine to use on threatened humans.Even the magnificent Emperor of Brazil condescended towrite Pasteur, begging him . . .

And you may guess how Pasteur was worried! This wasno affair like anthrax, where, if the vaccine was a little, justa shade too strong, a few sheep would die. Here a slipmeant the lives of babies. . . . Never was any microbe hun-ter faced with a worse riddle. “Not a single one of all mydogs 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 thispoor searcher who had made a too wonderful discovery.

. . . Horrid pictures of babies crying for the water theirstrangled throats would not let them drink—children killed

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by his own hands—such visions floated before him* in thedark. . . .

For a moment the actor, the maker of grand theatricgestures, rose in him again: “I am much inclined to beginon myself—inoculating myself with rabies, and then arrest-ing the consequences; for I am beginning to feel very sureof my results,” he wrote to his old friend, Jules Vermel.

At last, mercifully, the worried Mrs. Meister from Meis-sengott in Alsace took the dreadful decision out of Pasteur’sunsure hands. This woman came crying into the labora-tory, leading her nir^-year-old boy, Joseph, gashed infourteen places two days before by a mad dog. He was apitifully whimpering, scared boy—hardly able to walk.

“Save my little boy—Mr. Pasteur,” this woman beggedhim.

Pasteur told the woman to come back at five in theevening, and meanwhile he went to see the two physicians,Vulpian and Grancher—-admirers who had been in his lab-oratory, who had seen the perfect way in which Pasteurcould guard dogs from rabies after they had been terriblybitten. That evening they went with him to see the boy,and when Vulpian saw the angry festering wounds heurged Pasteur to start his inoculations: “Go ahead,” saidVulpian, “if you do nothing it is almost sure that he willdie.”

And that night of July 6, 1885, they made the first in-jection of the weakened microbes of hydrophobia into ahuman being. Then, day after day, the boy Meister wentwithout a hitch through his fourteen injections whichwere only slight pricks of the hypodermic needle into hisskin.

^Vnd the boy went home to Alsace and had never a sign<£ that dreadful disease.

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Then $11 fears left; Pasteur—it was very much like thecase of that first dog that Roux had injected years before,against the master’s wishes. So it was now with humanbeings; once little Meister came through unhurt, Pasteurshouted to the world that he was prepared to guard thepeople of the world from hydrophobia. This one case hadcompletely chased his fears, his doubts—those vivid but notvery deep-lying doubts of the artist that was in Louis Pas-teur.

The tortured bitten people of the world began1 to pourinto the laboratory of the miracle-man of the Rue d’Ulm.Research for a moment came to an end in the messy smallsuite of rooms, while Pasteur and Roux and Chamberlandsorted out polyglot crowds of mangled ones, babbling in ascore of tongues: “Pasteur—save us!”

And this man who was no physician—who used to saywith proud irony: “I am only a chemist,”—this man ofscience who all his life had wrangled bitterly with doctors,answered these cries and saved them. He shot his com-plicated, illogical fourteen doses of partly weakened germsof rabies—unknown microbes of rabies—into them andsent these people healthy back to the four corners of theearth.

From Smolensk in Russia came nineteen peasants, mou-jiks who had been set upon by a mad wolf nineteen days be-fore, and five of them were so terribly mangled they couldnot 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 excitedconcern about these bitten Russians who must surely die—it was so long since they had been attacked—and the towntalked of nothing else while Pasteur and his men started

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their injections. The chances of getting hydrophobia fromthe bites of mad wolves are eight out of ten: out of thesenineteen Russians, fifteen were sure to die. . . .

“Maybe,” said every one, “they will all die—it is morethan 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 eatnor did he sleep at all. He took a terrible risk, and morn-ing and night, twice as quickly as he had ever made thefourteen injections—twice a day to make up for lost time—he and his men shot the vaccine into the arms of the Rus-sians.

And at last a great shout of pride went up for this manPasteur, went up from the Parisians, and all of France andall the world raised a paean of thanks to him—for thevaccine marvelously saved all but three of the doomedpeasants. The moujiks returned to Russia and were wel-comed with the kind of awe that greets the return ofhopeless sick ones who have been healed at some miracu-lous shrine. And the Tsar of All the Russias sent Pasteurthe diamond cross of Stc. Anne, and a hundred thousandfrancs to start the building of that house of microbe hunt-ers in the Rue Dutot in Paris—that laboratory now calledthe Institut Pasteur. From all over the world—it was thekind of burst of generosity that only great disasters usuallycall out—from every country in the earth came money,piling up into millions of francs for the building of a lab-oratory in which Pasteur might have everything needed totrack down other deadly microbes, to invent weapons^gainst them. . . .

The laboratory was built, but Pasteur’s own work wasdone; his triumph was too much for him; it was a kind ofjigger, perhaps, that snapped the strain of forty years of

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never before heard-of ceaseless searching. He died in 1895in a little house near the kennels where they now kept hisrabid dogs, at Villeneuve l’Etang, just outside of Paris*His end was that of the devout Catholic, the mystic he hadalways been. In one hand he held a crucifix and in theother lay the hand of the most patient, obscure and im-portant of his collaborators—Madame Pasteur. Aroundhim, too, were Roux and Chambcrland and those othersearchers he had worn to tatters with his restless energy,those faithful ones he had abused, whom he had above allinspired; and these men who had risked their lives in thecarrying oat of his wild forays against death would nowhave died to save him, if they could.

That was the perfect end of this so human, so passion-ately imperfect hunter of microbes and saver of lives.

But there is another end of his career that I like to thinkof more—and that was the day, in 1892, of Pasteur’s seven-tieth birthday—when a medal was given to him at a greatmeeting held to honor him, at the Sorbonne in Paris. Listerwas there, and many other famous men from other na-tions, and in tier upon tier, above these magnificoes whosat in the seats of honor, were the young men of France—the students of the Sorbonne and the colleges and the highschools. There was a great buzz of young voices—all atonce a hush, as Pasteur limped up the aisle, leaning on thearm of the President of the French Republic. And then—it is the kind of business that is usually pulled oil to wel-come generals and that kind of hero who has directed thefutile butchering of thousands of enemies—the band of thc-Republican Guard blared out into a triumphal march.

Lister, tjie prince of surgeons, rose from his seat andhugged Pasteur and the gray-bearded important men andthe boys in the top galleries cried and shook the walls withthe roar of their cheering. At last the old microbe hunter

gave his speech—the voice of the fierce arguments was goneand his son had to speak it for him—and his last wordswere a hymn of hope, not so much for the saving of lifeas a kind of religious cry for a new way of life for men. Itwas to the students, to the boys of the high schools he wascalling:

. . Do not let yourselves be tainted by a deprecatingand barren skepticism, do not let yourselves be discouragedby the sadness of certain hours which pass over nations.Live in the serene peace of laboratories and libraries. Say toyourselves first: What have I done for my instruction?and, as you gradually advance, What have I done for mycountry? until the time comes when you may have the im-mense happiness of thinking that you have contributed insome way to the progress and good of humanity. . .

CHAPTER vi

ROUX AND BEHRINGMassacre the Guinea-Pigs

Jt was to save babies that they killed so many guinea-pigs!

Emile Roux, the fanatical helper of Pasteur, in 1888 tookup the tools his master had laid down, and started onsearches of his own. In a litde while he discovered astrange poison seeping from the bacillus of diphtheria—onerounce of the pure essence of this stuff was enough to killseventy-five thousand big dogs. A few years later, whileRobert Koch was bending under the abuse and curses ofjpd tines who had been disappointed by his supposed curefor consumption, Emil Behring, the poetical pupil of Koch,^icd out a strange virtue, an unknown something in the

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blood of guinea-pigs. It could make that powerful diph-theria poison completely harmless. . . . These two Emils re-vived men’s hopes after Koch’s disaster, and once more peo-ple believed for a time that microbes were going to beturned from assassins into harmless little pets.

What experiments these two young men made to dis-cover this diphtheria antitoxin! They went at it frantic tosave lives; they groped at it among bizarre butcherings ofcountless guinea-pigs; in the evenings their laboratories wereshambles like the battlefields of old days when soldierswere mangled by spears and pierced by arrows. Roux dugghoulishly into the spleens of dead children—Behringbumped his nose in the darkness of his ignorance againstfacts the gods themselves could not have predicted. Foreach brilliant experiment these two had to pay with a thou-sand failures.

But they discovered the diphtheria antitoxin.

They never could have done it without the modest dis-covery of Frederick Loeffler. He was that microbe hunterwhose mustache was so militaristic ’hat he had to keeppulling it down to see through his microscope; he satworking at Koch’s right hand in that brave time when thelittle mastfer was tracking down the tubercle bacillus. Itwas in the early eighteen eighties, and diphtheria, whichseveral times each hundred years seems to have violent upsand downs of viciousness—diphtheria was particularly mur-derous then. The wards of the hospitals for sick childrenwere melancholy with a forlorn wailing; there were gur-.gling coughs foretelling suffocation; on the sad rows ofnarrow beds were white pillows framing small faces bluewith the strangling grip of an unknown hand. Throughthese rooms walked doctors trying to conceal their hopeless-ness with cheerfulness; powerless they went from cot to cot—trying now and again to give a choking child its breath

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by pushing a tube into its membrane-plugged wind*pipe. . . .

Five out of ten of these cots sent their tenants to themorgue.

Below in the dead house toiled Frederick Loeffier, boil-ing knives, heating platinum wires red hot and with themlifting grayish stuff from the still throats of those bodiesthe doctors had failed to keep alive; and this stuff he putinto slim tubes capped with white fluffs of cotton, or hepainted it with dyes, which showed him, through his mi-croscope, that there were queer bacilli shaped like Indianclubs in those throats, microbes which the dye paintedwith pretty blue dots and stripes and bars. In nearly everythroat he discovered these strange bacilli; he hurried toshow them to his master, Koch.

There is little doubt Koch led Loeffier by the hand inthis discovery. “There is no use to jump at conclusions,”you can hear Koch telling him. “You must grow these mi-crobes pure—then you must inject the cultivations into ani-mals. ... If those beasts come down with a disease exactlylike human diphtheria, then . . .” How could Loeffier havegone wrong, with that terribly pedantic, but careful, truth-hunting little czar of microbe hunters squinting at himfrom behind those eternal spectacles?

One dead child after another Loeffier examined; hepoked into every part of each pitiful body; he stained ahundred different slices of every organ; he tried—andquickly succeeded—in growing those queer barred bacillipure. But everywhere he searched, in every part of eachbody, he found no microbes—except in the membrane-clut-tered thioat. And always here, in every child but one ortwo, he came on those Indian club-shaped rods. “How canthese few microbes, growing nowhere in the body but thefcfejfeat—how can these few germs, staying in that one place,

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•kill a child so quickly?” pondered Loeffler. “But I mustfollow Herr Koch’s directions!” and he proceeded to shootthe germs of his pure cultivations into the windpipes ofrabbits and beneath the skins of guinea-pigs. Quickly theseanimals died—in two or three days, like a child, or evenmore quickly—but the microbes, which Loeffler had shotinto them in millions, could only be found at the spotwhere he had injected them. . . . And sometimes therewere none to be found even here, or at best a few feebleones hardly strong enough, you would think, to hurt aflea. . . .

“But how is it these few bacilli—sticking in one littlecorner of the body—how can they topple over a beast amillion times larger than they are themselves?” askedLoeffler.

Never was there a more conscientious searcher than thisLoeffler, nor one witli less of a wild imagination to liven—or to spoil—his almost automatic exactness. He sat himselfdown; he wrote a careful scientific paper; it was modest, itwas cold, it was not hopeful, it was a most unlawycr-likereport reciting all of the fors and againsts on the questionof whether or no this new bacillus was the cause of diph-theria. He leaned over backward to be honest—he put lastthe facts that were against it! “This microbe may be thecause,” you can hear him mumbling as he wrote, “but ina few children dead of diphtheria I could not find thesegerms . . . none of my inoculated animals get paralysis aschildren do . . . what is most against me is that I’ve dis-covered this same microbe—it was vicious against guinea-pigs and rabbits too!—in the throat of a child with nevera sign of diphtheria.”

He even went so far as to underestimate the importanceof his exact fine searching, but at the end of his treatise hegave a clew to the more imaginative Roux and Behring

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who came after him. A strange man, this Loeffler! With-out 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 thethroat 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,sneaking from it to some vital spot in the body. Such atoxin must be found, in the organs of a dead child, in thecarcass of a guinea-pig dead of the disease—yes—and in thebroth where the bacillus grows so well. . . . The manfinding this poison will prove what I have failed to demon-strate.” Such was the dream Loeffler put into Roux’shead. . . .

Four years later Loeffler’s words came true—by whatseemed an ijtterly silly, but what was surely a most fantas-tical experiment you would have thought could only resultin drowning a guinea-pig. What a hectic microbe huntingwent on in Paris just then! Pasteur, in a state of collapseafter his triumph of the dog-bite vaccine, was feebly super-intending the building of his million-franc Institute in theRue Dutot. The wild, half-charlatan Metchnikoff hadcome out of Odessa in Russia to belch quaint theoriesabout how phagocytes gobble up malignant germs. Pas-teurians wdre packing microscopes in satchels and hurryingto Saigon in Indo-China and to Australia to try to discovermicrobes of weird diseases that did nor exist. Hopefullyfrantic women were burying Pasteur—he was too tired!—under letters begging him to save their children from adozen horrid diseases.

“If you will,” one woman wrote him, “you can surelyfind a remedy for the horrible disease called diphtheria. Out

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children, to whom we teach your name as a great benefac*tor, will owe their lives to you!”

Pasteur was absolutely done up, but Roux—and he washelped by the intrepid Ycrsin who afterward brilliantly dis-covered the germ of the black death—set out to try to finda way to wipe diphtheria from the earth. It wasn’t a sci-ence—it was a crusade, this business. It was full of passion,of purpose; it lacked skillful lying-in-wait, and those longplanned artistic ambushes you find in most discoveries. Iwill not say fimile Roux began his searching because ofthis pitiful note from that woman—but there is no doubthe worked to save rather than to know. From the old pal-sied master down to the most obscure bottle wiper, themen of this house in the Rue Dutot were humanitarians;they were saviors—and that is noble!—but this drove themsometimes into strange byways far off the road where youfind truth. . . . And in spite of this Roux made a marvel-ous discovery.

Roux and Yersin went to the Hospital for Sick Children—diphtheria was playing hell with Paris—and here theyran on to the same bacillus Loeffler had found. They grewthis microbe in flasks of broth, and did the regular acceptedthing first, shooting great quantities of this soup into an as-sorted menagerie of unfortunate birds and quadrupeds whohad to die without the satisfaction of knowing they weremartyrs. It wasn’t particularly enlightened searching, this,but almost from the tap of the gong, they stumbled onone of the proofs Loeffler had failed to find. Their diph-theria soup paralyzed rabbits! The stuff went into theirveins; in a few days the delighted experimenters watchedthese beasts drag their hind legs limply after them; thepalsy crept up their bodies to their front legs and shoulders—■they died in a clammy, dreadful paralysis. . . .

"It hits rabbits just the way it does children,” muttered

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Roux, full o£ a will to believe “This bacillus must be

the true cause o£ diphtheria. ... I shall find the germ inthese rabbits’ bodies now!” And he clawed tissues out of adozen corners of their carcasses; he made cultivations oftheir spleens and hearts—but never a bacillus! Only a fewdays before he had pumped a billion or so into them, eachof them. Here they were, drawn and quartered, carved upand searched from their pink noses to the white under-sideof their tails. And not a bacillus. What had killed themthen?

Then Loeffler’s prediction flashed over Roux: “It must bethe germs make a poison, in this broth, to paralyze andkill these beasts . . .” he pondered.

For a while the searcher came uppermost in him. Heforgot about possible savings of babies; he concentrated onvast butcheries of guinea-pigs and rabbits—he must provethat the diphtheria germ drips a toxin out of its wee body.- . . Together with Yersin he began a good unscientificfumbling at experiments; they were in the dark; therewere no precedents nor any kind of knowledge to go by.No microbe hunter before them had ever separated adeadly poison (though Pasteur had once made somethingof a try at it) from the bodies of microbes. They werealone in the dark, Roux and Yersin—but they lightedmatches. . . . “The bacilli must pour out a poison into thebroth we grow them in—just as they pour it from theirmembrane in a child’s throat into his blood!” Of coursethat last was not proved.

Then Roux stopped arguing in a circle. He searched. Heworked with his hands. It was worse, this fumbling of his,than trying to get a stalled motor to go when you knownothing about internal combustion machinery. He took bigjg^a^s bottles and put pure microbeless soup into them, andsowed pure cultivations of the diphtheria bacillus in this

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broth; into the incubating oven went the large-bellied bot-tles “Now we will try separating the germs from the

soup in which they grow,” said Roux, after the bottle hadripened for four days. 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 soupthrough, but so tight-meshed that it would hold the tiniestbacilli back. With tongue-protruding care to keep them-selves from being splashed with this deadly stuff, theypoured the microbe-teeming broth around the candles held/igid in shiny glass cylinders. They fussed—rnaybe, or atleast I hope so, with the blessed relief of profanity—but thebroth wouldn’t run through the porcelain. But at last theypushed it through with high air pressure—and finally theybreathed easy, arranging little flasks full of a clear, amber-colored filtered fluid (it had never a germ in it) on theirlaboratory bench.

“This stuff should have the poison in it . . . the filterhas held back all the microbes—but this stuff should killour animals,” muttered Roux. The laboratory buzzed witheager animal-boys getting ready the rabbits and guinea-pigs.Into the bellies of these beasts went the golden juice pro-pelled from the syringe by Roux’s deft hands. . . .

He became a murderer in his heart, this fimile Roux, andin his head as he came down to the laboratory each morn-ing were half-mad wishes for the death of his beasts. “Thestuff should be hitting them by now,” you can hear himgrowling to Yersin, but they looked in vain for the ruffledhair, the dragging hind legs, the cold shivering bodies totell them their wish was coming true.

It was beastly! All of this fussing with the delicate filterexperiments—and the animals munched at the greens intheir cages, they hopped about, males sniffed at femalesand engaged in those absurd scufflings with other males

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which guinea-pigs and rabbits hold to .be necessary to thepropagation of their kind. . . . Let these giants (who fedthem well) inject more of this stuff into their veins, theirbellies—poison? Imagination! It made them feel happy....

Roux tried again. He shot bigger doses of his filteredsoup into the animals, other animals, still more animals. Itwas no go, there was no poison.

That is, for a merely sensible man there would havebeen no poison in the filtered soup that had stood in theincubator for four days. Hadn’t enough animals beenwasted trying it? But Roux (let all mothers and childrenand the gods caring for insane searchers bless him!) was noreasonable man just then. For a moment he had caughtPasteur’s madness, his strange trick of knowing what allmen thought wrong to be right, his flair for good impossi-ble experiments. “There is a poison there!” you can hearthat hawk-faced consumptive Roux shout to himself, to thedusty, bottle-loaded shelves of his laboratory, to the guinea-pigs who would have snickered—if they could have—at hisearnest futile efforts to murder them. “There must be apoison in this soup where the diphtheria germs have grown—else why should those rabbits have died?”

Then—I have told scientific searchers about this and theyhave held their noses at such an experiment—Roux nearlydrowned a guinea-pig. For weeks he had been injectingmore and more of his filtered soup, but now (it was likefacing a night on a park bench with your last dime on thetwo dice) he injected thirty times as much! Not even Pas*teur would have risked such an outlandish dose—thirty-fivecubic centimeters Roux shot under the guinea-pig’s skinand you would expect that much water would kill such alittle beast. If he died it would mean nothing. . . . But'into the belly of a guinea-pig and into the ear-vein of arabbit went this ocean of filtered juice—it was as if he had

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put a bucketful of it into the veins of a middle-sized man.

But that was the way Roux carved his name on thosetablets which men while they are on earth must never al-low to crumble; for, though the rabbit and the guinea-pigstood 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 be-gan to come in little hiccups. In five days they were dead,with exactly those symptoms their brothers had, after injec-tions of the living diphtheria bacilli. So it was that £miURoux discovered the diphtheria poison. . . .

By itself this weird experiment of the gigantic dose olfeebly poisonous soup would only have made microbehunters laugh. It was scandalous. “What!—if a great flaskof diphtheria microbes can make so little poison that ittakes a good part of a bottle of it to kill a small guinea-pig—how can a few microbes in a child’s throat makeenough to do that child to death? It is idiotic!”

But Roux had got his start. With this silly experimentas an uncertain flashlight, he went tripping and stumblingthrough the thickets, he bent his sallow bearded face(sometimes it was like the face of some unearthly bird ofprey) over a precise long series of tests. Then suddenly hewas out in the open. Presently, it was not more than twomonths later, he hit on the reason his poison had been soweak before—he simply hadn’t left his germ-filled bottlesin the incubator for long enough; there hadn’t been timeenough for them really to get down to work to maketheir deadly stuff. So, instead of four days, he left the mi-crobes stewing at body temperature in their soup for forty-two days, and 'when he ran that brew through the filter—presto! With bright eyes he watched unbelievably tinyamounts of it do dreadful things to his animals—hecouldn’t seem to cut down the dose to an amount small

enough to keep it from doing sad damage to his guinea-pigs. Exultant he watched feeble drops of it do away withrabbits, murder sheep* lay large dogs low. He played withthis fatal fluid; he dried it; he tried to get at the chemistryof it (but failed); he got out a very concentrated essenceof it though, and weighed it, and made long calculations.

One ounce of that purified stuff was enough to kill sixhundred thousand guinea-pigs—or seventy-five thousandlarge dogs! And the bodies of those guinea-pigs who hadgot a six hundred thousandth of an ounce of this puretoxin—the tissues of those bodies looked like the sad tissuesof a baby dead of diphtheria. . . .

So it was Roux made Loeffler’s prophecy come true; itwas that way he discovered the fluid messenger of deathwhich trickles from the insignificant bodies of diphtheriabacilli. But he stuck here; he had explained how a diph-theria germ murders babies but he had found no way tostop its maraudings. There was that letter from themother—but Roux’s researches petered out into various di-rections to doctors how to grow germs pure out of chil-dren’s throats at the bedside, and into suggestions for use-ful gargles. ... He hadn’t Pasteur’s tremendous grimstick-to-itiveness, nor his resourceful brain.

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But away in Berlin there toiled another £mile—the Ger-mans leave off the last “e”—Emil August Behring. Heworked in Koch’s laboratory, in the dilapidated buildingcalled the “Triangel” in the Schumann street. Here greatthings were stirring. Koch was there, no longer plain Doc-tor Koch of Wollstein, but now a Herr Professor, an emi-nent Privy Councilor. But his hat still fitted him; hepeered through his spectacles, saying little; he was enor-mously respected, and against his own judgment he was

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trying to convince himself he had discovered a cure for tu-berculosis. The authorities (scientists‘have reason occasion-ally to curse all authorities no matter how benevolent)were putting pressure on him. At least so it is whisperednow by veteran microbe hunters who were there and re-member those brave times.

“We have showered you with medals and microscopesand guinea-pigs—take a chance now, and give us a bigcure, for the glory of the Fatherland, as Pasteur has donefor the glory of France!” It was ominous stuff like thisKoch was always hearing. He listened at last, and whocan blame him, for what man can remain at his properbusiness of finding out the ways of microbes with Govern-ments bawling for a place in the sun—or with motherscalling? So Koch listened and prepared his own disasterby telling the world about his “Tuberculin.” But at thesame time he guided his youngsters in fine jobs they weredoing—and among these young men was Emil AugustBehring. How Koch pointed the gun of his cold marvel-ous criticism at that poet’s searchings!

And what a house of microbe hunters it was, that dingyTriangel! Its walls shook under the arguments and gut-tural cries and incessant experiments of Koch’s young men.Paul Ehrlich was there, smoking myriads of cigars, smear-ing his clothes and his hands and even his face with a pris-matic array of dyes, making bold experiments to find outhow baby mice inherit immunity to certain vegetable poi-sons from their mothers. . . . Kitasato, the round-facedJapanese, was shooting lock-jaw bacilli into the tails ofmice and solemnly amputating these infected tails—to seewhether the creatures would perish from the poisons themicrobes had made while the tails were still attached. . . .And there were many others there, some forgotten andsome whose names are now famous. With a vengeance the

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Germans were setting out to beat the French, to bury themunder a vast confusion of experiments, to save mankindfirst.

But particularly, Emil Behring was there. He was a littleover thirty; he was an army doctor; he had a little beard,neater than Koch’s scraggly one, but with less signs oforiginality. Just the same Behring’s head, in spite of thatprosaic beard, was the head of a poet; and yet, though hewas fond of rhetoric, no one stuck closer to his laboratorybench than Behring. He compared the grandeur of theMaster’s discovery of the tubercle bacillus to the rosy tip ofthe snow-capped peak of his favorite mountain in Switzer-land, while he probed by careful experiments into why ani-mals are immune to microbes. He compared the stormycourse of human pneumonia to the rushing of a mountainstream, while he discovered a something in the blood ofrats—this stuff would kill anthrax bacilli I He had twoscientific obsessions, which were also poetical: one was thatblood is the most marvelous of the juices circulating in liv-ing things (what an extraordinary mysterious sap it was,this bloodI)—the other was the strange notion (pot anew one) that there must exist chemicals to wipe invadingmicrobes out of animals and men—without hurting themen or the animals.

“I will find a chemical to cure diphtheria!” he cried, andinoculated herds of guinea-pigs with cultivations of virulentdiphtheria bacilli. They got sick, and as they got sicker heshot various chemical compounds into them. He triedcostly salts of gold, he tried naphthylamine, he tested morethan thirty different strange or common substances. He be-lieved innocently because these things could kill microbesin a glass tube without damaging the tube, they wouldalso hit the diphtheria bacilli under a guinea-pig’s hidewithout ruining the guinea-pig. But alas, from the slaugh-

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ter house of dead and dying guinea-pigs his laboratorywas, you would suppose he would have seen there waslittle to choose between the deadly microbes and his equallymurderous cures. . . . Nevertheless, being a poet, Behringdid not have too great a reverence for facts; the hecatombsof corpses went on piling up, but they failed to shake hisfaith in some marvelous unknown remedy for diphtheriahidden somewhere among the endless rows of chemicalsin existence. Then, in his enthusiastic—but random—searchhe came upon the tri-chloride of iodine.

Uritler the skins of several guinea-pigs he shot a dose ofdiphtheria bacilli sure to kill them. In a few hours thesemicrobes began their work; the spot of the injection be-came swollen, got ominously hot, the beasts began to droop—then, six hours after the fatal dose of the bacilli, Behringshot in his iodine tri-chloride. . . . “It is no good, oncemore,” he muttered. The day passed with no improvementand the ijext morning the beasts began to go into collapses.Solemnly he put the guinea-pigs on their backs, then pokedthem with his finger to see if they could still scrambleback on their feet. . . . “If the guinea-pig can still get upwhen you poke him, there may be yet a chance for him,”explained Behring to his amazed assistants. What a testthat was—think of a doctor having a test like this to seewhether or no his patient would live! And what anabominably crude test! Less and less the iodine-treatedguinea-pigs moved when he poked them—there was nowno longer any hope. . . .

Then one morning Behring came into his laboratory tosee those guinea-pigs on their feet! Staggering about, anddreadfully scraggly looking beasts they were, but they weregetting better from diphtheria, these creatures whose un-treated companions had died days before. . . .

“I have cured diphtheria!” whispered Behring.

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In a fever he went at trying to cure more guinea-pigswith this iodine stuff; sometimes the diphtheria bacillihilled these poor beasts; sometimes the cure killed them;once in a while one or two of them survived and crawledpainfully back to their feet. There was little certainty ofthis horrible cure and no rime or reason. The guinea-pigswho survived, probably wished they were dead, for whilethe tri-chloride was curing them it was burning nasty holesin their hides too—they squeaked pitifully when theybumped these gaping sores. It was an appalling business!

Just the same, here were a few guinea-pigs, sure—dkceptfor this iodine—to have died of diphtheria; and they werealive! I often ponder how terrible was the urge forcingmen like Behring to try to cure disease—they were notsearchers for truth, but rabid, experimenting healers rather;ready to kill an animal or even a child maybe with onedisease to cure him of another. They stopped at nothing.. . . For, with no evidence save these few dilapidatedguinea-pigs, with no other proof of the virtues of this blis-tering iodine tri-chloride, Behring proceeded to try it onbabies sick with diphtheria.

And he reported: “I have not been encouraged by certaincarefully instituted tests of iodine tri-chloride on childrensick with diphtheria. . . .”

But here were still some of those feeble but curedguinea-pigs, and Behring clutched at some good his mur-derous gropings might do. The gods were kind to him.He pondered, and at last he asked himself: “Will thesecured animals be immune to diphtheria now?” He tookthese creatures and shot an enormous dose of diphtheriabacilli into them. They stood it! They never turned a hairat millions of bacilli, enough to kill a dozen ordinary ani-mals. They were immune!

Now Behring no longer trusted chemicals (think of the

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beasts that had gone down to the incinerator!) but he stillhad his fixed notion that blood was the most marvelous ofthe saps coursing through living things. He worshipedblood; his imagination gave it unheard-of excellences andstrange virtues. So—with more or less discomfort to hisdecrepit cured guinea-pigs—he sucked a little blood with asyringe out of an artery in their necks; he let the tubesholding this blood stand until clear straw-colored serumrose over the red part of the blood. With care he drewthis scrum off with a tiny pipet—he mixed the scrum witha quantity of virulent diphtheria bacilli: “Surely there issomething in the blood of these creatures to make them soimmune to diphtheria,” pondered Behring; “undoubtedlythere is something in this serum to kill the diphtheria mi-crobes. . . .”

He expected to see the germs shrivel up, to watch themdie, but when he looked, through his microscope, he sawdancing masses of them—they were multiplying, “exuber-antly multiplying,” he wrote in his notes with regret. Butblood is wonderful stuff. Some way it must be at the bot-tom of his guinea-pig’s immunity. “After all,” mutteredBehring, “this Frenchman, Roux, has proved it isn’t thediphtheria germ but the poison it makes—it is the poisonkills animals, and children. . . . Maybe these iodine-curedguinea-pigs are immune to the poison too!”

He tried it. With sundry guttural gruntings, with a cer-tain poetic sloppincss, Behring got ready a soup which heldpoison but had been freed of microbes. Huge doses of thisstuff he pumped from a syringe under the hides of his de-creasing number of desolate cured guinea-pigs. Again, theywere immune! Their sores went on healing, they grew fat.The poison bothered them no more than had the bacilliwhich made it. Here was something entirely new in mi-crobe hunting, something Roux maybe dreamed of but

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couldn’t make come true. Pasteur had guarded sheepagainst anthrax, and children from the bites of mad dogs,but here was something incredible—Behring, giving guinea-pigs diphtheria and then nearly killing them with hisfrightful cure, had made them proof against the microbe’smurderous toxin. He had made them immune to the stuffof which one ounce was enough to kill seventy-five thou-sand big dogs. . . .

“Surely it is in the blood I will find this antidote whichprotects the creatures!” cried Behring.

He must get some of their blood. There were hardly anyof the battered but diphtheria-proof guinea-pigs left now,but he must have blood! He took one of the veterans,and cut into its neck to find the artery; there was no ar-tery left—his numerous blood lettings had obliterated it.He poked about (let us honor this animal!) and finall)got a driblet of blood out of a vessel in its leg. What anervous time it was for Behring, and I do not knowwhether it is Behring or his beasts who is most to be pit-ied, for every morning he came down to the laboratorywondering whether any of his priceless animals were leftalive. . . . But he had a few dtops of scrum now, from acured guinea-pig. lie mixed this, in a glass tube, with alarge amount of the poisonous soup in which the diph-theria microbes had grown.

Into new, non-immunc guinea-pigs went this mixture—and they did not die!

“How true are the words of Goethe!” cried Behring.“Blood is an entirely wonderful sap!”

Then, with Koch the master blinking at him, and withthe entire small band of maniacs in the laboratory breath-less for the result, Behring made his famous critical experi-ment. He mixed diphtheria poison with the serum of ahealthy guinea-pig who was not immune, who had never

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had diphtheria or been cured from it either, and this serumdid not hinder one bit the murderous action of the poison.He shot this mixture into new guinea-pigs; in three daysthey grew cold; when he laid them on their backs andpoked them with his finger they did not budge. In a fewhours they had coughed their last sad hiccup and passedbeyond. . . .

“It is only the serum of immune animals- of beasts whohave had diphtheria and have been cured of it- it is onlysuch serum kills the diphtheria poison!” cried Behring.Healer that he was, you can hear him mutteiing: “Now,maybe, I can make larger animals immune too, and getbig batches of their poison-killing scrum, then I'll try thaton children with diphtheria . . . what saves guinea-pigsshould cure babies!”

By this time nothing could discourage Behring. Likesome victorious general swept on by the momentum of hisfirst bloody success, he began shooting diphtheria microbes,and iodine tri-chloride, and the poison of diphtheria mi-crobes, into rabbits, into sheep, into dogs. He tried to turntheir living bodies into factories for making the healingserum, the toxin-killing scrum. “Antitoxin” he called suchserum. And he succeeded, after those maimings and holo-causts and mistakes, always the necessary preludes to histriumphs. In a little while he had sheep powerfully im-mune, and from them he got plenty of blood. “Surely theantitoxin fhe hadn’t the faintest notion what the chemistryof this mysterious stuff was] certainly it will prevent diph-theria,” said Behring.

He injected little doses of the sheep serum into guinea-pigs; the next day he pumped virulent diphtheria bacilliinto these same beasts. It was marvelous to watch them.There they were, scampering about with never a sign ofsickness, while their companions (who had got no protect-

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ing dose of serum) perished miserably in a couple of days.How good it was to see them die, those unguarded beasts!For it was these creatures told him how well the serumsaved the other ones. Hundreds of pretty experiments ofthis kind Behring made (there was little sloppiness now)and his helpers maybe pointed to their foreheads, askingwhether their chief would ever have done saving one setof guinea-pigs and killing another set to prove he hadsaved the first. But Behring had reasons. “We made somany experiments because we wanted to show Herr Kochhow far we had come in our immunizing of laboratoryanimals,’’ he wrote in one of his early reports.

There was only one fly in the ointment of his success—the guarding action of the antitoxin serum didn’t last long.For a few days after guinea-pigs had got their injections ofserum they stood big doses of the poison, but presently, ina week or two weeks, it took less and less of the toxin tokill them. Behring pulled at his beard: “This isn’t prac-tical,” he muttered, “you couldn’t go around giving all thechildren of Germany a shot of sheep serum every fewweeks!” And alas, his eagerness for something to makethe authorities wide-eyed, led him away from his fine fuss-ings with a way to prevent diphtheria—it sent him a-whor-ing after the pound of cure. . . .

“Iodine tri-chloride is almost as bad for guinea-pigs asthe microbes are—but this antitoxin serum, it doesn’t givethem sores and ulcers ... I know it won’t hurt my ani-mals ... I know it kills poison . . . now, if it wouldcure!”

Carefully he shot fatal doses of diphtheria bacilli into alot of guinea-pigs. Next day, they were seedy. The secondday their breath came anxiously. They stayed on theirbacks with that fatal laziness. . . . Then Behring took halfof this lot of dying beasts, and into their bellies he injected

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ti good heavy dose of the antitoxin from his immune sheep.Miracles! Nearly every one of them (luit not all) began tobreathe more easily in a little while. Next day, when heput them on their backs, they hopped nimbly back to theirfeet. They stayed there. By the fourth day they were asgood as new, while their untreated companions, cold,dead, were being carried out by the animal boy. . . . Theserum cured!

The old laboratory of the Triangel was in a furor now,over this triumphant finish of Behring’s sloppy stumblingOdyssey. The hopes of everybody were purple- surely nowhe would save children! While he was getting ready hisserum for the first fateful test on some biby near to deathwith diphtheria, Behring sat flown to write his classic re-port on how he could cure beasts sure to die, by shootingInto them a new, an unbelievable stuff their brother beastshad made in their own bodies- at the risk of nearly dyingthemselves. “We have no certain recipe for making ani-mals immune,” wrote Behring; “these experiments I haverecorded do not include only my successes.” Surely theydid not, for Behring set down the messings and the fias-coes along with the few lucky stabs that gave him hissanguinary victory. . . . How could this pottering poethave pulled off the discovery of the diphtheria antitoxin?But then, come to think of it, those first ancient namelessmen who invented sails to carry swift boats across the wa-ter—they must have groped that way too. . . . How manyof the crazy craft of those anonymous geniuses turned tur*tie? It is the way discoveries are made. . . .

Toward the end of the year 1S91, babies lay dying ofdiphtheria in the Bergmann clinic in the Brick Street inBerlin. On the night of Chrisrmas, a child desperately sickwith diphtheria cried and kicked a little as the needle ofthe first syringe full of antitoxin slid under its tender skin.

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The results seemed miraculous. A few children died; thelittle son of a famous physician of Berlin passed out mys-teriously a few minutes after the serum went into him andthere was a great hullabaloo about that—but presentlylarge chemical factories in Germany took up the makingof the antitoxin in herds of sheep. Within three yearstwenty thousand babies had been injected and like a rumorspread the news, and Biggs, the eminent American HealthOfficer, then in Europe, was carried away by the excite-ment. lie cabled dramatically and authoritatively to Dr.Park in New York:

DIPHTHERIA ANTITOXIN IS A SUCCESS; BE-GIN TO PRODUCE IT.

In the excitement of this cure, those sad ones, who hadlost dear ones through the first enthusiasm about the dan-gerous injections of the consumption cure of Koch, forgottheir sorrow and forgave Koch because of his brilliant pu-pil Behring.

IV

But there were still criticisms and muttered complaints,and this was natural, for the scrum was no sure-fire, onehundred per cent curative stuff for babies—any more thanit was for guinea-pigs. Then too, learned doctors pointedout that what happened under the hide of a guinea-pigwas not the same—necessarily—as the savage thing goingon in the throat of a child. Thousands of children weregetting the diphtheria serum, but some children (maybenot so many as before perhaps?) kept dying horribly inspite of it. Doctors questioned. . . . Some parents hadtheir hopes dashed. . . .

Then Emile Roux came back into the battle. He discov-ered brilliantly an easy way to make horses immune to the

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poison—they did not die, they developed no horrid ab-scesses, and, best of all, they furnished great gallon bottlesfull of the precious antitoxin—powerful stuff this serumwas; little bits of it destroyed large doses of that poisonfatal to so many big dogs.

Like Behring—perhaps he was even more passionatelysure than Behring—Roux believed in advance this antitoxinwould save suffering children from death. lie thoughtnothing of prevention, he forgot about his gargles. Hehurried to and fro between his workroom and the stables,carrying big-bellied flasks, jabbing needles into those pa-tient horse’s necks. Just then, a particularly virulent breed(so Roux thought) of diphtheria bacillus was crawlingthrough the homes of Paris. At the Hospital for SickChildren, fifty out of every hundred children (at least fhestatistics said so) were being carried blue-faced to themorgue. At the Hospital Trousseau as many as sixty outof a hundred were dying (but it is not clear whether thedoctors there knew all these deaths to be from diphtheria).On the first of February, 1^4, Roux of the narrow chestand hatchet face and black skull cap, walked into thediphtheria ward of the Hospital for sick children, carryingbottles of his straw-colored, miracle-working stuff.

In his study in the Institute in the Rue Dutot with agleam in his eye that made his dear ones forget he wasmarked for death, there sat a palsied man, who mustknow, before he died, whether one of his hoys had wipedout another pestilence. Pasteur waited for news fromRoux. . . . Then too, all over Paris there were fathers andmothers of stricken ones, praying for Roux to hurry—theyhad heard of this marvelous cure of Doctor Behring. Itcould almost bring babies back to life, folks said—andRoux could see these people holding out their hands tohim. . . .

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He got ready his syringes and bottles with the same coldsteadiness the farmers had marveled at, long before, inthose great days of the anthrax vaccine tests at Pouilly-le-Fort. His assistants, Martin and Chaillou, lighted the littlealcohol lamp and hurried to anticipate his slightest order.Roux looked at the helpless doctors, then at the little lead-colored faces and the hands that picked and clutched atthe edges of the covers, the bodies twisting to get a littlebreath. . . .

Roux looked at his syringes—did this serum really savelife?

“Yes!” shouted Emile Roux, the human being.

“I don’t know—let us make an experiment,” whispered£mile Roux, the searcher for truth.

“But, to make an experiment, you will have to withholdthe scrum from half at least ot these children— vou maynot do that.” So said tmile Roux, the man with a heart,and all voices of all despairing parents were joined to thepleading voice of this fimile Roux.

“True, it is a terrible burden,” answered the searcherthat was Roux, “but just because this serum has cured rab-bits, I do not know it will cure babies. . . . And I mustknow. I must find truth. Only by comparing the numberof children who die, not having been given this serum,with the number who perish, having received it—only socan I ever know.”

“But if you find out the serum is good, if it turns outfrom your experiment that the serum really cures—think ofyour responsibility for the death of those children, thosehundreds of babies who did not get the antitoxin!”

It was a dreadful choice. There was one more argumentthe searcher that was Roux could have brought against theman of sentiment, for he might have asked: “If we do notfind out surely, by experiment on these babies, the world

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may be lulled into the belief it has a perfect remedy fordiphtheria—microbe hunters will stop looking for a rem-edy, and in the years that follow, thousands of childrenwill die who might have been saved if hard scientificsearching had gone on. . . .”

That would have been the final, the true answer of sciencc to sentiment. But it was not made, and who after allcan blame the pitying human heart of Roux for leavingthe cruel road that leads to truth? The syringes wereready, the scrum welled up into them as he gave a strongpull at the plungers. He began his merciful and maybelife-saving injections, and every one of the more than thicchundred threatened children who came into the hospitalduring the next five months received good doses of tindiphtheria antitoxin. Praise be, the results were a great vin-dication for the human Roux, for that summer, the experi-ment over, he told a congress of eminent medical men andsavants from all parts of the world:

“The general condition of the children receiving thtserum improves rapidly . . . in the wards there are to beseen hardly any more faces pale and lead blue . . . instead,the demeanor of the children is lively and gay I”

He went on to tell the Congress of Buda-Pcsth how theserum chased away the slimy gray membrane—that breeding place where the bacilli made their terrible poison—outof the babies’ throats. He related how their fevers werecooled by this marvelous serum (it was like some breezeblowing from a lake of northern water across the ficr\pavements of a city). The most dignified congress otprominent and celebrated physicians cheered. It rose to itsfeet. . . .

And yet—and yet—twenty-six out of every hundred babics Roux had treated—died, in spite of this marvelousserum. . . .

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But it was an emotional time, remember, and Roux, andthe Congress of Buda-Pesth were not assembled to servetruth but to discuss and to plan and to celebrate the savingof lives. They cared little for figures then; they cared lessfor annoying objectors who carped about comparing fig-ures; they were swept away by Rouxs report of how theserum cooled fevered brows. Then, Roux could have an-swered such annoying critics (with the applause of his fa-mous audience): “What if twenty-six out of a hundred diddie—you must remember that for years before this treat-ment fifty out of a hundred died!”

And yet—I, who believe in this antitoxin, I say this,twenty years after—diphtheria is a disease having strangeups and downs of viciousness. In some terrible decades itkills its sixty out of a hundred; then some mysteriousthing happens and the virus seems to weaken and only terchildren arc taken where sixty died before. So it was, inthose brave days of Roux and Behring, for in a certainhospital in England, in those very days, the death ratefrom diphtheria had gone down from forty in a hundredto twenty-nine in a hundred—before the serum was everused!

But the doctors at Buda-Pesth did not think of figuresand they carried home the tidings of the antitoxin to allcorners of the world, in a few years the antitoxin treat-ment of diphtheria became orthodox, and now there is notone doctor out of a thousand who will not swear that thisantitoxin is a beautiful cure. Probably they are right. In-deed, there is evidence that when antitoxin is given on thefirst day of the disease, all but a few babies are saved—andif there is delay, many are lost- . . . Surely, any doctorshould be called guilty, in the light of what is known,who did not give the antitoxin to a threatened child. Iwould be quick to call a doctor to give it to one of my

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own children. Why not, indeed? Perhaps the antitoxincures. But it is not completely proved, and it is too latenow to prove it one way or another to the hilt, because,since all the world believes in the antitoxin, no man canbe found heartless enough or bold enough to do the ex-periment which science demands.

Meanwhile the searchers, believing, are busy with otherthings—and I can only hope, if another wave of the dread-ful diphtheria of the eighties sweeps over the world again,I can only hope that Roux was right.

But even if the diphtheria antitoxin is not a sure cure,we already know that the experiments of Roux and Beh-ring have not been in vain. It is a story still too recent, toomuch in the newspapers to be a part of this history—butto-day, in New York under the superb leadership of Dr.Park, and all over America, and in Germany, hundreds ofthousands of babies and school-children are being ingeni-ously and safely turned into so many small factories forthe making of antitoxin, so that they will never get diph-theria at all. Under the skins of these youngsters go weedoses of that terrible poison fatal to so many big dogs—butit is a poison fantastically changed so that it is harmless toa week-old baby!

There is every hope, if fathers and mothers can only beconvinced and allow their children to undergo three smallsafe pricks of a syringe needle, that diphtheria will nolonger be the murderer that it has been for ages.

And for this men will thank those first crude searchingsof Loefflcr and Roux and Behring.

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CHAPTER VII

METCHNIKOFF

The Nice Phagocytes

Microbe hunting has always been a queer humpty-dumpty business.

A janitor with no proper education was the first man tosee microbes; a chemist put them on the map and madepeople properly afraid of them; a country doctor turnedthe hunting of them into something that came near to be-ing a science; to save the lives of babies from the poison ofone of the deadliest of them, a Frenchman and a Germanhad to pile up mountains of butchered guinea-pigs and rab-bits. Microbe hunting is a story of amazing stupidities, fineintuitions, insane paradoxes. If that is the history of thehunting of microbes, it is the same with the story of thescience, still in its babyhood, of why we are immune tomicrobes. For Mctchnikoff, the always excited searcherwho in a manner of speaking founded that science—thisMetchnikofT was not a sober scientific investigator; he wasmore like some hysterical character out of one of Dostoev-ski’s novels.

Elie Metchmkoff was a Jew, and was born in southernRussia in 1845, and before he was twenty years old, hesaid: “I have zeal and ability, I am naturally talented—Iam ambitious to become a distinguished investigator!”

He went to the University of KharkofI, borrowed thethen rare microscope from one of his professors, and afterpeering (more or less dimly) through it, this ambitiousyoung man sat himself down and wrote long scientific pa-

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pcrs before he had any idea at all of what science was. Hebolted his classes for months on end, not to play, but toread; not to read novels mind you but to wallow throughlearned works on the “Crystals of Protcic Substances” andto become passionate about inflammatory pamphlets whosediscovery by the police would have sent him to the minesin Siberia. He sat up nights, drinking gallons of tea andharanguing his young colleagues (all of them forefathersof the present Bolshevik!) on atheism until they nick-named him “God-Is-Not.” Then, a few days before theend of the term, he crammed up the neglected lessons ofmonths; and his prodigious memory, which was more likesome weird phonograph record than any human brain,made it possible for him to write home to his folks that hehad passed first and got a gold medal.

Metchnikol! was always trying to get ahead of himself.He sent papers to scientific journals while he was still inhis teens; he wrote these papers frantically a few houisafter he had trained his microscope on some bug or beetle;the next day he would look at them again, and find thatwhat he had been so certain of, was not quite the samenow. Hastily he wrote to the editor of the scientific journal: “Please do not publish the manuscript I sent you yes-terday. I find I have made a mistake.” At other times hewas furious because his enthusiastic discoveries were turneddown by the editors. “The world docs not appreciate me!”he cried, and he went to his room, ready to die, dolefullywhistling: “Were I small as a snail, I would hide myself inmy shell.”

But if Metchnikoff sobbed because his vivid talents wereunderestimated by his professors, he was also irrepressible.He forgot his contemplated suicides and his violent head-aches in his incessant interest in all living things, but hewas constantly spoiling his chances to do a good steady

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piece of scientific work by getting into quarrels with histeachers. Finally he told his mother (who had alwaysspoiled him and believed in him): “I am especially inter-ested in the study of protoplasm ... but there is no sci-ence in Russia,” so he rushed off to the University ofWurzburg in Germany, only to find that he had arrivedthere six weeks ahead of the opening of school. He soughtout some Russian students there, but they gave him thecold shoulder—he was a Jew—then, tired of life, he startedback home, thinking of killing himself but with a fewbooks in his satchel—and one of these was the just-pub-lished “Origin of Species” of Darwin. He read it, he swal-lowed the Theory of Organic Evolution with one greatmental gulp, he became a bigoted supporter of it—fromthen on evolution was his religion until he began foundingnew scientific religions of his own.

He forgot his plans for suicide; he planned strange evo-lutionary researches; he lay awake nights, seeing visions—huge panoramas they were, of all beasts from cockroachesto elephants, as the children of some one remote and infi-nitely tiny ancestor. . . .

That conversion was Metchnikoff’s real start in life, fornow he set out (and kept at it for ten years), quarrelingand expostulating his way from one laboratory to another,from Russia through Germany to Italy, and from Italy tothe island of Heligoland. He worked at the evolution ofworms. He accused the distinguished German zoologistLeuckart of stealing his stuff; incurably clumsy with hisfingers, he clawed desperately into a lizard to find thestory of evolution its insides might tell him—and when hecould not find what he wanted, he threw what was left ofthe reptile across the laboratory. Unlike Koch or Leeuwen-hoek, who were great because they knew how to ask ques-tions of nature, Metchnikoff read books on Evolution, was

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inspired, shouted “Yes!” and then by vast sloppy experi-ments proceeded to try to force his beliefs down nature’sthroat. Strange to say, sometimes he was right, importantlyright as you will see. Up till now (it was in the late eigh-teen seventies) he knew nothing about microbes, but allthe time his mania to prove the survival of the fittest wasdriving him toward his fantastic theory—partly true—ofhow mankind resists the assaults of germs.

Metchnikoff’s first thirty-five years were a hubbub and aperilously near disastrous groping toward this event—to-ward that great notoriety that waited for him on the Is-land of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea. At twenty-threehe had married Ludmilla Fcodorovitch, who was a con-sumptive and had to be carried to the wedding in an in-valid’s chair. Then followed a pitiful four years for them.They dragged about Europe, looking for a cure; Mctchni-koff trying in odd moments snatched from an irritatcdlyrender nursing of his wife, to do experiments on the devel-opment of green flies and sponges and worms and scor-pions—trying above all to make some sensational discoverywhich might land him a well-paid professorship. “The sur-vivors are not the best but the most cunning,” he whis-pered, as he published his scientific papers and pulled hiswires. . . .

Finally Ludmilla died; she had spent her last days sol-aced by morphine, and now MetchnikofT, who had caughtthe habit from her, wandered from her grave throughSpain to Geneva, taking larger and larger doses of the drug—meanwhile, his eyes hurt him terribly, and what is a nat-uralist, a searcher, without eyes?

“Why live?” he cried, and took a dose of morphine thathe knew must kill him, but the dose was too large, he be-came nauseated and threw it up. “Why live?” he criedagain and took a hot bath and rushed out in the open aii

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right afterwards to try to catch his death of pneumonia.But it seems that the wise witty gods who fashion search-ers had other purposes for him. That very night hestopped, agape at the spectacle of a cloud of insects swirl-ing round the flame of a lantern. “These insects live onlya few hours!” he cried to himself. “How can the theory ofthe survival of the fittest he applied to them?” So heplunged back into his experiments.

Mctchnikoff’s grief was terrific but it did not last long.He was appointed Professor at the University of Odessa,and there he taught the Survival of the Fittest and becamerespected for his learning, and grew in dignity, and in lessthan two years after the death of Ludmilla, lie had metOlga, a bright girl of fifteen, the daughter of a man ofproperty. “His appearance is not unlike that of the Christ—he is so pale and seems so sad,” whispered Olga. Soonafter they were married.

From then on Mctchnikoff’s life was much less disas-trous; he tried far less often to commit suicide; his handsbegan to catch up with his precocious brain—he was learn-ing to do experiments. Never was there a man who triedmore sincerely to apply his religion (which was science)to every part of his life. He took Olga in hand and taughther sc’cnce and art, and even the art and science of mar-riage! She worshiped the profound certainties that sciencegave him, but said, long afterwards: “The scientific meth-ods which Metchnikoff applied to everything might havebeen a grave mistake at this delicate psychological mo-ment. . . .”

n

It was in 1883, when rhe discoveries of Pasteur and Kochhad made everybody mad about microbes, that MetchnikofIturned suddenly from a naturalist into a microbe hunter.

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He had wrangled with the authorities of the University ofOdessa, and departed for the Island of Sicily with Olgaand her crowd of little brothers and sisters, and here he setup his amateur laboratory in the parlor of their cottagelooking across the magic water to the blue Calabrian shore.His intuition told him that microbes were now the thingin science and he dreamed about making great discoveriesof new microbes—he was sincerely interested in them aswell, but he knew nothing about the subtle ways of hunt-ing them, indeed he had hardly seen a germ. lie stampedabout his parlor-laboratory, expounding biological theoriesto Olga, studying starfish and sponges, telling the childrenfairy stories, doing everything in short that was as far aspossible removed from those thrilling researches of Kochand Pasteur. . . .

Then, one day, lie began to study the way sponges andstarfishes digest their food. Long before he had spied outstrange cells inside these beasts, cells that were a part oftheir bodies, bur cells that were free-lances, as it were, mov-ing from place to place through the carcasses of whichthey formed a part, sticking out one part of themselvesand dragging the rest of themselves after the part they hadstuck out. Such were the wandering cells, which movedby flowing, exactly like that small animal, the ameba.

MetchnikofI sat down before his parlor table, and withthat impatient clumsiness of a man whose hands seem un-able to obey his brain, he got some little particles of car-mine into the insides of the larva of a starfish. This wasan ingenious and very original trick of MetchnikofT’s, be-cause these larva: are as transparent as a good glass win-dow; so he could see, through his lens, what went on in-side the beast; and with excited delight he watched thecrawling, flowing free-lance cells in this starfish ooze to-ward his carmine particles—and eat them up! Metchni-

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koff still imagined he was studying the digestion of hisstarfish, but strange thoughts—that had nothing to dowith such a commonplace thing as digestion—little fog-vvraiths of new ideas began to flutter through his head. . . .

The next day Olga took the children to the circus to seesome extraordinary performing monkeys. Metchnikoff satalone in his parlor, tugging at his biblical beard, gazingwithout seeing them at his bowls of starfish. Then—it waslike that blinding light that bowled Paul over on his wayto Damascus—in one moment, in the most fantastical,you would say impossible flash of a second, Metchnikoffchanged his whole career.

“These wandering cells in the body of the larva of a star-fish, these cells eat food, they gobble up carmine granules—but they must eat up microbes too! Of course—the wan-dering cells arc what protect the starfish from microbes!Our wandering cells, the white cells of our blood—theymust be what protects us from invading germs . . . theyare the cause of immunity to diseases . . . they are whatkeep the human race from being killed off by malignantbacilli!”

Without one single bit of evidence, without any researchat all, Metchnikoff jumped from the digestions of starfishto the ills of men. . . .

“I suddenly became a pathologist,” he wrote in his diary(and this was not much more strange than if a cornetplayer should suddenly announce himself an astrophysi-cist!) “ Feeling that there was in this idea something

of surpassing interest, I became so excited that I began strid-ing up and down the room, and even went to the seashoreto collect my thoughts.”

Now Koch, precise microbe hunter that he was, wouldhardly have trusted Metchnikoff with the wiping of his

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microscope, but his ignorance of germs was nothing to thiswild Russian.

“I said to myself that, if my theory was true, a sliver putinto the body of a starfish larva . . . should soon be sur-rounded by wandering cells. . . .” And he rememberedthat when men run splinters into their fingers, and neg-lect to pull them out, those splinters are soon sun mindedby pus—which consists largely of the wandering whitecells of the blood. He rushed out into the garden back ofthe cottage, pulled some rose thorns off a little shrubwhich he had decorated as a Christmas tree for Olga’sbrother and sisters; he dashed back into his absurd labora-tory and stuck these thorns into the body of one of hiswater-clear young starfish. . . .

Up he got, at dawn the next morning, full of wildhopes,—and he found his guess had come true. Aroundthe rose-slivers in the starfish were sluggish crawling mas-ses of its wandering cells! Nothing more was necessary(such a jumper at conclusions was he) to stamp into hisbrain the fixed idea that he now had the explanation of allimmunity to diseases; he rushed out that morning to tellfamous European professors, who happened then to be inMessina, all about his great idea. “Here is why animalscan withstand the attacks of microbes,” he said, and hetalked with such enthusiastic eloquence about how thewandering cells of the starfish tried to eat the rose thorns(and he could show it so prettily too) that even the mosteminent and pope-like Professor Doctor Virchow (who hadsniffed at Koch) believed him!

Metchnikoff was now a microbe hunter. . . .

hi

With Olga and the children flapping along and keepingup as best they could, Metchnikoff hurried to Vienna to

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proclaim his theory that we are immune to get ms becauseour bodies have wandering cells to gobble germs up; hemade a bee-line for the laboratory of his friend. ProfessorClaus—who was a zoologist, and knew nothing about mi-crobes either, and so was properly amazed:

MI would be greatly honored to have you publish yourtheory in my Journal,” said Claus.

“But I must have a scientific name for these cells thatdevour microbes—a Greek name—what would be a Greekname for such cells?” cried MctchnikofT.

Claus and his learned colleagues scratched their headsand peered into their dictionaries and at last they told him:“Phagocytes! Phagocyte is Greek for devouring cell—phag-ocytes is what you must call them!”

MetchnikofT thanked them, tacked the word “phagocyte”to the head of his mast, and set sail on the seas of his ex-citing career as a microbe hunter with that word as a reli-gion, an explanation of everything, a slogan, a means ofgaining a living—and, though you may not believe it, thatword did result in something of a start at finding out howit is we are immune! From then on he preached phago-cytes, he defended their reputations, he did some real re-search on them, he made enemies about them, he doubt-less helped to start the war of 1914 with them, by thebad feeling they caused between France and Germany.

He went from Vienna to Odessa, and there he gave agreat scientific speech on “The Curative Forces of the Or-ganism” to the astonished doctors of the town. His deliv-ery was superb; his sincerity was undoubted—but there isno record of whether or not he told the amazed doctorsthat he had not, up till then, so much as seen one phago-cyte gobble up a single malignant microbe. Everybody—and this includes learned doctors—will stop to watch adog fight; so this idea of MetchnikofT’s, this story of out

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little white blood cells rushing to an endless series of Ther-mopylae to man the pass against murderous germs—thisyarn excited them, convinced them. . . .

But Metchnikoff knew he would have to have real evi-dence, and presently he found it, beautifully clear, inwater fleas. For a time he forgot speeches and beganfishing water fleas out of jxmds and aquariums; here hewas dcuccdly ingenious again, for these small animals, likestarfish larva.*, were transparent so that he could seethrough his lens what went on inside them. For once hegrew impatient, and searched, like the real searcher thathe so rarely was, for some disease that a water flea per-chance might have. This history has already made it clearthat microbe hunters usually find other things than theyset out to look for—but MetchnikofT just now had differ-ent luck; he watched his water fleas in their aimless dailylife, and suddenly, through his lens he saw one of thesebeasts swallow the sharp, needle-like spores of a dangerousyeast. Down into the wee gullet went these needles,through the walls of the flea’s stomach they poked theirsharp poiius, and into the tiny beast's body they glided.Then—how could the gods favor such a wild man so!—Mctchnikoff saw the wandering cells of the water flea, thephagocytes of this creature, flow towards those perilousneedles, surround them, eat them, melt them up, digestthem. . . .

When—and this happened often too and so made histheory perfect—the phagocytes failed to go out to battleagainst the deadly yeast needles, these invaders budded rap-idly into swarming yeasts, which in their turn ate thewater flea, poisoned him—and that meant good-by to him!

Here Metchnikoff had peeped prettily into a thrilling,deadly struggle on a tiny scale, he had spied upon the uptill now completely mysterious way in which certain living

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creatures defend themselves against their would-be assassins.His observations were true as steel, and you will have togrant they were devilishly ingenious, for who would havethought to look for the why of immunity in such an ab-surd beast as the water flea? Now MetchnikofI needednothing more to convince him of the absolute and finalrightness of his theory, he probed no deeper into this strug-gle (which Koch would have spent years over) but wrotea learned paper:

“The immunity of the water flea, due to the help of itsphagocytes, is an example of natural immunity . . . for,once the wandering cells have not swallowed the yeastspore at the moment of its penetration into the body, theyeast germinates . . . secretes a poison which drives thephagocytes back nor only, but kills them by dissolvingthem completely.”

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Then Mctchnikoff went to sec if this same battle tookplace in frogs and rabbits, and suddenly, in 1886, the Rus-sian people were thrilled by Pasteur’s saving of sixteen oftheir folk from the bite of the mad wolf. The good peo-ple of Odessa and the farmers of the Zemstvo round aboutgave thanks to God, hurrahs for Pasteur, and a mightypurse of roubles for a laboratory to be started at once inOdessa. And Mctchnikoff was appointed Scientific Direc-tor of the new Institute—for had not this man (they for-got for a moment lie was Jewish) studied in all the Uni-versities of Europe, and had he not lectured learnedly tothe doctors of Odessa, telling about the phagocytes of theblood, which gobble microbes?

“Who knows?” you can hear the people saying. “Maybein our new Institute, Professor MetchnikofI can train theselittle phagocytes to gobble up all microbes?”

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MctchnikofT accepted the position, but told the authoritics, shrewdly: “I am only a theoretician; 1 am over-whelmed with researches—some one else will have to betrained to make vaccines, to do the practical work."

Nobody in Odessa knew anything about microbe hunt-ing then, so Mctchnikoffs friend. Doctor Gamaleia, wassent to the Pasteur Institute in Paris posthaste. The citi-zens were anxious to begin to be prevented from havingdiseases; they bawled for vaccines. So Gamaleia, after alittle while in Paris, where he watched Roux and Pasteurand learned a great deal from them, but not quite enough—this Gamaleia came back and started to make anthraxvaccines for the sheep of the Zemstvo, and rabies vaccinesfor the people of the town. “All should now go verywell!” cried MctchnikofT (he knew nothing of the nastytricks virulent microbes can play) and he retired to his the-oretical fastnesses to grapple with rabbits and dogs andmonkeys, to sec if their phagocytes would swallow the mi-crobes of consumption and relapsing fever and erysipelas.Scientific papers vomited from his laboratory, and thesearchers of Europe began to be excited by the discoveriesof this strange genius in the south of Russia. But he beganto have troubles with his theory, for dogs and rabbits andmonkeys—alas—arc not transparent, like water fleas. . . .

Then the shambles began. Gamaleia and the other mem-bers of Metchnikoff’s practical staff began to fight amongthemselves and mix up vaccines; microbes spilled out oftubes; the doctors of the town—naturally a little jealous ofthis new form of healing—started to snoop into the labora*tory, to ask embarrassing questions, to start whispers goingthrough the town: “Who is this Professor Metchnikoff—hehasn’t even a doctor’s certificate. He is only a naturalist, amere bug-hunter—how can he know anything about pre-venting diseases?”

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“Where are those cures?” demanded the people. “Giveus our preventions!” shouted the farmers—who had gonedown into their socks for good roubles. MetchnikofI camenut of the fog of his theory of phagocytes for a moment,and tried to satisfy them by sowing chicken cholera bacilliamong the meadow mice which were eating up the crops.But, alas, a lying, imflammatory report appeared in thedaily paper, screaming that this MetchnikofI was sowingdeath—that chicken cholera could change into human chol-era. . . .

“I am overwhelmed with my researches,” muttered Metch-nikofl. “1 am a theoretician--my researches need a peacefulshelter in which to be developed. . . So he asked for avacation, got it, packed his bag, and went to the Congressof Vienna to tell everybody about phagocytes, and to lookfor a quiet place in which to work. He must get awayfrom that dreadful need to prove that his theories weretrue by dishing out cures to impatient authorities and peas-ants who insisted on getting their money's worth out ofresearch. From Vienna he went to Paris to the Pasteur In-stitute, and there a great triumph and surprise waited forhim. He was introduced to Pasteur, and at once Mctchni-koff exploded into tremendous explanations of his theoryof phagocytes. He made a veritable movie of the battlebetween the wandering cells and microbes. . . .

The old captain of the microbe hunters looked at Metch-nikofI out of tired gray eyes that now and then sparkled alittle: “I at once placed myself on your side, ProfessorMetchnikofI,” said Pasteur, “for I have been struck by thestruggle between the divers microorganisms which I havehad to observe. I believe you are on the right road.”

Although the struggles Pasteur mentioned had nothingto do with phagocytes gobbling up microbes, MetchnikofI—and this is not unnatural—was filled with a proud joy.

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The greatest of all microbe hunters really understood him,believed in him. . . . Olga’s father had died, leaving thema modest income, here in Paris his theory of phagocyteswould have the prestige of a great Institute back of it. “Isthere a place for me here?” he asked. “I wish only towork in one of your laboratories in an honorary capacity,”begged Mctchnikoff.

Pasteur knew how important it was to keep the plainpeople thrilled about microbe hunting—it is the drama ofscience that they can understand—so Pasteur said: “Youmay not only come to work in our laboratory, but youshall have an entire laboratory to yourself!” Metchnikoffwent back lo Odessa, getting a dreadful snubbing fromKoch on the way, and wondered whether it would not hebest to give up his tidy salary at the Russian Institute, toget away from these people yelling for results. . . . Buthe began to take up his work again, when suddenly some-thing happened that left no doubt in his mind as to whathe had better do.

In response to the farmer’s complaints of “Where areyour vaccines, our flocks are perishing from anthrax!”Mctchnikoff had told Dr. Gamalcia to start giving sheepthe anthrax vaccine on a large scale. Then, one brightmorning, while the Director was with Olga in their summerhome, in the country, a fearful telegram came to him fromGamalcia:

“MANY THOUSANDS OF SHEEP KILLED BYTHE ANTHRAX VACCINE.”

A few months later they were safely installed in the newPasteur Institute in Paris, and Olga (who enjoyed paintingand sculpture much better—but who would do anythingfor her husband because he was a genius, and always kindto her) this good wife, Olga, held his animals and washed

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his bottles for Metchnikofl. From then on they marched,hand in hand, over a road strewn with their picturesquemistakes, from one triumph to always greater victories andnotorieties.

Mctchnikoll bounced into the austere Pasteur Instituteand started a circus there which lasted for twenty years; itwas as if a skilled proprietor of a medicine show had be-come pastor of a congregation of sober Quakers. lie cameto Paris and found himself already notorious. His theoryof immunity—it would be better to call it an excitingromance, rather than a theory—this story that we are im-mune because of a kind of battle royal between our phag-ocytes and marauding microbes, this yarn had thrown thesearchers of Europe into an uproar. The microbe huntersof Germany and Austria for the most part did not believeit—on the contrary, tempted to believe it by its simplicityand prettincss, they denied it with a peculiar violence. Theydenounced MetchnikofT in congresses and by experiments.One old German, Baumgarten, wrote a general denuncia-tion of phagocytes, on principle, once a year, in an im-portant scientific journal. For a little while Metchnikoflwavered; he nearly swooned, he couldn’t sleep nights, hethought of going back to his soothing morphine; he evencontemplated suicide once more—oh! why could not thosenasty Germans see that he was right about phagocytes?Then he recovered. Something seemed to snap in his brain,he became courageous as a lion, he started a battle for histheory—it was a grotesque, partly scientific wrangle—but,in spite of all its silliness, it was an argument that laid thefoundations of the little that is known to-day about whywe are immune to microbes.

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“I have demonstrated that the serum of rats kills anthraxgerms—it is the blood of animals not their phagocytes,rhat makes them immune to microbes," shouted KmilBehring, and all the bitter enemies of MeuhnikolT sangAye in the chorus. The scientific papers published to showthat blood is the one important thing would fill threeuniversity libraries.

“It is the phagocytes that cat up germs and so defendus,” roared Metchnikoff in reply And he published in-genious experiments which proved anthrax bacilli growexuberantly in the blood of sheep which have been madeimmune by Pasteur’s vaccine.

Neither side would budge from this extieme, prejudicedposition. For twenty years both sides were so enraged theycould not stop to think that perhaps lx>rh our blood andour phagocytes might work together to guard us fromgerms. That fight was a kind of magnificent but undigni-fied shouting of “You’re a liar— On the contrary, it’s youthat’s the liar!” which blinded MetchnikolT and his oppo-nents to the idea that it might be neither the blood northe phagocytes which arc at the bottom of our resistanceto some diseases. If they had only stopped for a momentwiped their brows and cleaned the blood from their men-tal noses, to remember how little they knew, how slowlythey should go—considering what subtle complicated stuffthis blood and those phagocytes arc—if they had only re-membered how foolish, in the darkness of their ignorance,it was to cook up any explanation at all of why we areimmune! If Metchnikoff had only kept on, obscure inOdessa, with his beautiful researches on the why of thewandering cells of the water fleas eating up those terriblelittle yeasts. ... If he had only been patient and tried toget to the bottom of that!

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Hut the stumbling strides of microbe hunters are notmade by any perfect logic, and that is the reason I maywrite a grotesque, but not perfect story of their deeds.

In the grand days of Pasteur’s fight with anthrax and hisvictory against rabies, he had worked like some subterra-nean distiller of secret poisons, with only Roux andChambcrland and one or two others to help him. In thatdingy laboratory in the Rue d’Ulm he had been very im-polite, even nasty, to all curious intruders and ambitiouspersons. lie even chased adoring pretty ladies away. ButMetchnikofT!

Here was an entirely different sort of searcher. Mctchni-kolT had an immensely iinpicssivc heard and a broad fore-head that crowned eyes which squinted vividly—and in-telligently—from behind his spectacles. His hair grew downover the hack of his neck in a way that showed you hewas too deep in thoughts to think of having it cut. Heknew everything! He could tell—and it was authentic—of countless biological mysteries; he had seen the wander-ing cells of a tadpole turn it into a frog by eating thetadpole's tail, and lie had built circles of fire aroundscorpions to show that these unhappy creatures, failing tofind a way out, do not commit suicide by stinging them-selves to death. He told these horrors in a way to makeyou feel the remorseless flowing and swallowing of thewandering cells—you could hear the hissing of the doomedand ballled scorpion. . . .

He had brilliant ideas for experiments and was alwaystrying to carry out these ideas—intensely—but at any mo-ment he was ready to drop his science to praise the operasof Mozart or whistle the symphonies of Beethoven, andsometimes he seemed to be more learned about the dramasand the loves of Goethe than about those phagocytes upon

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which his whole fame rested. He refused to wear a highhat toward lesser men; he would see any one and wasready to believe anything—he even tried the remedies ofpatent medicine quacks on dying guinea-pigs. And he wasi kind man. When his friends were sick he overwhelmedthem with delicacies and advice and shed sincere tears oniheir pillows—so that finally they nicknamed him “MammaMctchnikoff." His views on the intimate instincts and neces-sities of life were astoundingly unlike those of any searcherI have ever heard of. “The truth is that artistic genius andperhaps all kinds of genius are closely associated withsexual activity ... so, for example, an orator speaks betterin the presence of a woman to whom he is devoted."

He insisted that he could experiment best when prettygirls were close by!

Metchnikoff’s workshop in the Pasteur Institute w.ismore than a mere laboratory; it was a studio, it had thevariegated attractions of a country fair; it radiated theverve and gusto of a three-ringed circus. Is it any wonder,then, that young doctors, eager to learn to hunt microbes,Hocked to him from all over Europe? Their brains re-sponded to this great searcher who was also a hypnotist,and their fingers flew to perform the ten thousand experi-ments, ideas for which belched out of the mind of Metch-nikoff like an incessant eruption of fireworks.

“Mr. Saltykoff!” he would cry. “This student of Pro-fessor Pfeiffer in Germany claims that the scrum of aguinea-pig will keep other guinea-pigs from dying of hog-cholera. Will you be so good as to perform an experimentto see if that is so?” And the worshiping Saltykoff rushedoff—knowing what the master wanted to prove—to showthat the German claims were nonsense. For a hundredother intricate tests, for which his own fingers were too

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impatient, MetchnikofT called upon Blagovestchensky, orHugcnschmidr, or Wagner, or Ghcorgiewski, or the nowalmost forgotten Sawtchcnko. Or when these were all busy,then there was Olga to be lured away from her paints andclay models—Olga could be depended upon to prove themost delicate points. In that laboratory there were a hun-dred hearts that beat as one and a hundred minds with buta single thought—to write the epic of those tiny, roundish,colorless, wandering cells of our blood, those cells, which,smelling from afar the approach of a murderous microbe,swam up the current of the blood, crawled strangelythrough the walls of the blood vessels to do battle withthe germs and so guard us from death.

The great medical congresses of those brave days wereexciting debating societies about microbes, about immunity,and it was in the weeks before a congress (MetchnikolTalways went to them) that his laboratory buzzed with aninfernal rushing to and fro. “Wc must hurry,” Metchni-kofT exclaimed, “to make all of the experiments necessarylo support my arguments!” The crowd of adoring assistants then slept two hours less each night; MetchnikofT rolledup his sleeves, too, and seized a syringe. Young rhinocerosbeetles, green frogs, alligators, or weird Mexican axolotlswere brought from the animal house by the swearinghelpers (sometimes the ponds were dredged for perch andgudgeon). Then the mad philosopher, his eyes alight, hisbroad face so red that it glowed like some smolderingbrush-fire under his beard, his mustaches full of bacilli spat-tered into it by his excited and poetic gestures—this Metch-nikoff, I say, proceeded to inject swarms of microbes intoone or another of his uncomplaining, cold-blooded menag-erie. “I multiply experiments to support my theory of phag-ocytes!” he was wont to say.

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VI

It is amazing, when you remember that his brain wasalways inventing stories about nature, how often thesestories turned out to be true when they were put to thetest of experiment. A German hunter had claimed: “Thereis nothing to MctchnikolTs theory of phagocytes. Every-body knows that you can see microbes inside of phagocytes— they have undoubtedly been gobbled up by thephagocytes. But these wandering, cells are not defenders,they arc mere scavengers—they will only swallow deadmicrobes!” The London Congress of i8i)i was drawingnear; MetchnikofT shouted for some guinea-pigs, vaccinatedthem with some cholera-like bacilli that his old friend, theunfortunate Gamalcia, had discovered. Then, a week or solater, the big-bearded philosopher shot some of these living,dangerous bacilli into the bellies of vaccinated beasts. Everyfew minutes, during the next hours, he ran slender glasstubes into their abdomens, sucked out a few drops of thefluid there, and put it before the more or less dirty lens ofhis microscope, to see whether the phagocytes of the im-mune beasts were eating up Gamaleia's bacilli. Presto!These roundish crawling cells were crammed full of themicrobes!

“Now I shall prove that these microbes inside the phago-cytes arc still alive!” cried MetchnikofT. lie killed theguinea-pig, slashed it open, and sucked into another littleglass tube some of the grayish slime of wandering cellswhich had gathered in the creature's belly to make mealsoff the microbes. In a little while—for they arc very deli-cate when you try to keen them alive outside the body--the phagocytes had died, burst open, and the live bacillithey had swallowed galloped out of them! Promptly, when

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Metchnikoff injected them, these microbes that had beenswallowed, murdered guinea-pigs who were not immune.

By dozens of brilliant experiments of this kind, Metch-nikoff forced his opponents to admit that phagocytes, some-times, can eat vicious microbes. But the pitiful waste ofthis brainy MctchnikofFs life was that he was always doingexperiments to defend an idea, and not to find the hiddentruths of nature. His experiments were weird, they wereoften fantastically entertaining, but they were so artificial—they were so far away from the point of what it is thatmakes us immune. You would think that his brain, whichseemed to be able to hold all knowledge, would havedreamed of subtle tests to find out just how it is that onechild can be exposed to consumption and never get it,while some carefully and hygienically raised young girldies from consumption at twenty. There is the riddle ofimmunity (and it is still completely a riddle!). “Oh! it isdoubtless due to the fact that her phagocytes are not work-ing!” Metchnikoff would have exclaimed, and then hemight rush off to flabbergast some opponent by provingthat the phagocytes of an alligator eat up typhoid feverbacilli—which never bother alligators anyway.

The devotion of the workers in his laboratory wasamazing. They let him feed them virulent cholera bacilli(even one of those pretty inspirational girls swallowedthem!) to prove that the blood has nothing to do withour immunity to cholera. For years—he himself said thatit was an insanity of his—he was fond of toying with thelives of his researching slaves, and the only thing that ex-cused him was his perfect readiness to risk death along withthem. He swallowed more tubes of cholera bacilli thanany of them. In the midst of this dangerous business,'oneof the assistants, Jupille, became violently sick with realAsiatic cholera and Metchnikoff’s remorse was immoderate.

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“T shall never survive the death of Jupille!” he moaned,and Olga, that good wife, had to be on her guard dayand night to keep her famous husband from one of his(always fruitless) attempts at suicide. At the end of thesestrange experiments, Metchnikoff jabbed needles into thearms of the survivors, drew blood from them, and trium-phantly found that this blood did not protect guinea-pigsfrom doses of virulent cholera germs. How he hated theidea of blood having any importance! “Human choleragives us another example,” he wrote, “of a malady whosecure cannot be explained by the preventive properties ofthe blood.”

When some more than ordinarily independent studentwould come whispering to him that he had discovered aremarkable something about blood, Metchnikoff becamemagnificent like Moses coming down off Mt. Sinai—searchers for mere truth had a bad time in that laboratory,and you can imagine the great dauntless champion of phagocytes ordering a dissenter from his theory to be burned,and then weeping inconsolably over him afterwards. But,just the same, Metchnikoff—so great was the number ofexperiments made by an always changing crowd of eagerexperimenters in his laboratory—this Metchnikoff was partlyresponsible for the discovery of some of the most astound-ing virtues of blood. For, in the midst of his triumphs,Jules Bordet came to work with the master. This Bordetwas the son of the schoolmaster of the village of Soigniesin Belgium. He was timid, he seemed insignificant, he hadcareless ways and watery-blue, absent-minded eyes—eyesthat saw things nobody else was looking for. Bordet set towork there, and right in the shadow of the master’s beard,while the walls shook with the slogan “Phagocytes!”—theBelgian pried into the mystery of how blood kills germs;he laid the foundation for those astounding delicate tests

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which tell whether blood is human blood, in murder cases,It was here too, that Bordet began the work which led,years later, to the famous blood test for syphilis—the Was-sermann reaction. Metchnikoff was often annoyed withBordet, but he was proud of him too, and whenever Border found anything in blood that was harmful to microbes,and might help to make people immune to them, Metchni-kotf consoled himself by inventing more or less accurateexperiments which showed that these microbe-killing thingscame from the phagocytes, after all. Bordet did not remainlong in MetchnikofPs laboratory. . . .

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when ro-mantic microbe hunting began to turn into a regular pro-fession, recruited from good steady law-abiding young doc-tors who were not prophets or reckless searchers—in thosedays MetchnikofPs bitter trials with people who didn’t be-lieve him began to be less terrible. He received medals andprizes of money, and even the Germans clapped their handsand were respectful when he walked majestically into somecongress. A thousand searchers had spied phagocytes in theact of gobbling harmful germs--and although that did notexplain at all why one man dies from an attack of pneu-monia microbes, while another breaks into a sweat andgets better—just the same there is no doubt that pneumoniagerms are sometimes eaten and so got rid of by phagocytes.So Metchnikoff, after you discount his amazing illogic, hisintolerance, his bullheadedncss, really did discover a factwhich may make life easier for suffering mankind. Be-cause, some day, a dreamer, an experimenting genius likethe absent-minded Bordet may come along—and he maysolve the riddle of why phagocytes sometimes gobble germsand sometimes do not—he might even teach phagocytesalways to eat them. . . .

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VII

At last Metchnikoff began really to be happy. His op-ponents were partly convinced, and partly they stoppedarguing with him because they found it was no use—hecould always experiment more tirelessly than they, hecould talk longer, he could expostulate more loudly. SoMetchnikoff, at the beginning of the twentieth century, satdown to write a great book on all that he had found outabout why we are immune. It was an enormous treatiseyou would think it would take a lifetime to write. It waswritten in a style Flaubert might have envied. He madeevery one of the ten thousand facts in it vivid, and everyone of them was twisted prettily to prove his point. It is astrange novel with a myriad of heroes—the wandering cells,the phagocytes of all the animals of the earth.

His fame made him take a real delight in being alive.Twenty years before, detesting the human race, sorry forhimself, and hating life, he had told Olga: “It is a crimeto have children—no human being should consciously re-produce himself.” Hut now that he had begun to takedelight in existence, the children of Sevres, the suburb wherehe lived, called him “Grandpa Christmas” as he patted theirheads and gave them candy. “Life is good!” he told him-self. But how to hang onto it, now that it was slippingaway so fast? In only one way, of course—by science!

“Disease is only an episode!” he wrote. “It is not enoughto cure (he had discovered no cures) ... it is necessary tofind out what the destiny of man is, and why he must growold and die when his desire to live is strongest.” ThenMetchnikoff abandoned work on his dead phagocytes andset out to found fantastic sciences to explain man’s destiny,and to avoid it. To one of these, the science of old age, he

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gave the sonorous name “Gerontology,” and he gave thename “Thanatology” to the science of death. What awfulsciences they were; the ideas were optimistic; the obser-vations he made in them were so inaccurate that old Leeu-wenhoek would have turned over in his grave had he knownabout them; the experiments Metchnikoff made, to supportthese sciences, would have caused Pasteur to foam with in-dignation that he had ever welcomed this outlandish Rus-sian to his laboratory. And yet—and yet—the way reallyto prevent one of the most hideous microbic diseases cameout of them. . . .

Metchnikoff dreaded the idea of dying but knew thathe and everybody else would have to—so he set out todevise a hope (there was not one particle of science in this)for an easy death. Somewhere in his vast hungry readings,he had run across the report of two old ladies who hadbecome so old that they felt no more desire for life—theywanted to die, just as all of us want to go to sleep at theend of a hard day’s work. “Ha!” cried Metchnikoff, “thatshows that there is an instinct for death just as there is aninstinct for sleep! The thing to do is to find a way to livelong enough in good health until we shall really crave todie!”

Then he set out on a thorough search for more of suchlucky old ladies, he visited old ladies’ homes, he rushedabout questioning old crones, with their teeth out, wThowere too deaf to hear him. He went all the way fromParis to Rouen to interview (on the strength of a news-paper rumor) a dame reported to be a hundred and six.But, alas, all of the oldsters he talked to were strong forlife, he never found any one like the two legendary oldladies. Just the same he cried: “There is a death instinct!”Contrary facts never worried him.

He studied old age in animals; and people were always

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sending him gray-haired dogs and dilapidated ancient cats;he published a solemn research on why a superannuatedparrot lived to be seventy. He owned an ancient he-turtle,who lived in his garden, and MetchnikofT was overjoyedwhen this venerable beast—at the great age of S6—matedwith two lady turtles and became the father of broods oflittle turtles. He dreaded the passing of the delights oflove, and exclaimed, remembering his turtle: “Senility isnot so profoundly seated as wc suppose!”

Put to push back old age? What is at the bottom ofit? A Scandinavian scientist, Edgren, had made a deepstudy of the hardening of the arteries—that was the causeof old age, suggested Edgren, and among the causes ofthe hardening of the arteries were the drinking of alcohol,syphilis, and certain other diseases.

“A man is as old as his arteries, that is true,” mutteredMetchnikofT, and he decided to study the riddle of howthat loathsome disease hardens the arteries. It was in 1903.He had just received a prize of five thousand francs, andRoux—who, though so different, so much more the searcher,had always stuck by this wild MetchnikofT—Roux had gotthe grand Osiris prize of one hundred thousand francs.Never were there two men so different in their ways ofdoing science, but they were alike in caring little formoney, and together they decided to use all of these francs—and thirty thousand more which MetchnikofT hadwheedled out of some rich Russians—to study that venerealplague, to attempt to give it to apes, to try to discover its thenmysterious virus, to prevent it, to cure it if possible. AndMetchnikofT wanted to study how syphilis hardened thearteries.

So they bought apes with this money. French governorsin the Congo sent black boys to scour the jungles for them,and presently large rooms at the Pasteur Institute were a-

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chatter with chimpanzees and orang-outangs, and the criesof these were drowned out by the shrieking of the sacredmonkey of the Hindoos, and the caterwaulings of the com-ical little Macacus cynemolgus.

Almost at once Roux and Metchnikoff made an impor-tant find; their experiments were ingenious and they hadabout them a certain tautness and clearness that wasstrangely un-Mctchnikoflian. Their laboratory began to bethe haunt of unfortunate men who had just got syphilis;from one of these they inoculated an ape—and the veryfirst experiment was a success. The chimpanzee developedthe disease. From then on, for more than four years theytoiled, transmitting the diseases from one ape to another,looking for the sneaking slende microbe but not findingit, trying to find ways to weaken the virus—as Pasteur haddone with the unknown germ of rabies—in order to dis-cover a preventive vaccine. Their monkeys died miserablyof pneumonia and consumption, they got loose and ranaway. While Metchnikoff, not too deftly, scratched thehorrible virus into them, the apes bit him and scratchedhim back—and then Metchnikoff did a strange and cleverexperiment. He scratched a little syphilitic virus into theear of an ape, and twenty-four hours later he cut off thatear! The ape never showed one sign of the disease in anyother part of his body. . . .

“That means/' cried Metchnikoff, “that the germ lingersfor hours at fhe spot where it gets into die body—now, asin men we know exactly where the virus gets in, maybewe can kill it before it ever spreads—since in this diseasewe know just when it gets in, too!”

So Metchnikoff, with Roux always being careful and in-sisting upon good check experiments—so Metchnikoff,after all of his theorizing about why we are immune, per-formed one of the most profoundly practical of all the ex-

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periments of microbe hunting. He sat himself clown andinvented the famous calomel ointment—that now is chasingsyphilis out of armies and navies the world over. He tooktwo apes, inoculated them with the syphilitic virus freshfrom a man, and then, one hour later, he rubbed the gray-ish ointment into that scratched spot on one of his apes.He watched the horrid signs of the disease appear on theunanointed beast, and saw all signs of the disease stay awayfrom the one that had got the calomel.

Then for the last time MctchnikofFs strange insanity gothold of him. He forgot his vows and induced a youngmedical student, Maisonncuve, to volunteer to be scratchedwith syphilis from ail infected man. Before a committee ofthe most distinguished medical men of France, this braveMaisonncuve stood up, and into six long scratches hewatched the dangerous virus go. It was a more severe in-oculation than any man would ever get in nature. Theresults of it might make him a thing for loathing, mightsend him, insane, to his death. . . . For one hour Maison-neuve waited, then MetchnikofT, full of confidence, rubbedthe calomel ointment into the wounds—but not into thosewhich had been made at the same time on a chimpanzeeand a monkey. It was a superb success, for Maisotmeuveshowed never a sign of the ugly ulcer, while the simians,thirty days afterwards, developed the disease— there was nodoubt about it.

Moralists—and there were many doctors among these,mind you—raised a great clamor against these experimentsof MetchnikofT. “It will remove the penalty of immorality!”said they, “to spread abroad such an easy and a perfectmeans of prevention!” But Metchnikolf only answered.“It has been objected that the attempt to prevent the spreadof this disease is immoral. But since all means of moralprophylaxis have not prevented the great spread of syphilis

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and the contamination of innocents, the immoral thing isto restrain any available means we have of combating thisplague.” *

VIII

Meanwhile he was scheming and groping about and hav-ing dreams about other things that might cause the arteriesto harden, and suddenly he invented another cause—surelyno one can say he discovered it!—“auto-intoxication, poison-ing from the wild, putrefying bacilli in our large intestines—that is surely a cause of the hardening of the arteries,that is what helps us to grow old too soon!” he cried.He devised chemical tests—what awful ones they were—that would show whether the body was being poisonedfrom the intestine. “We would live much longer,” he said,“if we had no large intestine, indeed, two people arc onrecord, who had their large intestine cut out, and live per-fectly well without it.” Strange to say, he did not advocatecutting the bowels out of evciy one, but he set aboutthinking up ways of making things there uncomfoi tablefor the “wild bacilli.”

His theory was a strange one, and caused laughter andjeers and he began to get into trouble again. People wrotein, reminding him that elephants had enormous large in-testines but lived to be a hundred in spite of them; thatthe human race, in spite of its large intestine, was one ofthe longest-lived species on earth. He engaged in vastobscene arguments about why evolution has allowed ani-mals to keep a large intestine—then suddenly he hit on hisgreat remedy for auto intoxication. There were villages inBulgaria where people were alleged to live to be more thana hundred. MetchnikofT didn’t go down there to see— hebelieved it. These ancient people lived principally uponsour milk, so went the story. “Ah! there’s the explanation,”

\

he muttered. He put the youngsters in his laboratory tostudying the microbe that made milk sour—and in a littlewhile the notorious Bulgarian bacillus made its bow inthe rank of patent medicines. *

“This germ,” explained Mctchnikoff, “by making theacid of sour milk, will chase the wild poisonous bacilli outof the intestine.” He began drinking huge draughts ofsour milk himself, and later, for years, he fed himself cul-tivations of the Bulgarian bacillus. He wrote large booksabout his new theory and a serious English journal ac-claimed them to be the most important scientific treatisessince Darwin s “Origin of Species.” The Bulgarian bacillusbecame a rage, companies were formed, and their directorsgrew rich off selling these silly bacilli. Mctchnikoff letthem use his name (though Olga insists he never made afranc from that) for the label.

For nearly twenty years Mctchnikoff austerely lived tothe letter of his new theory. He neither drank alcoholicdrinks nor did he smoke. He permitted himself no de-baucherics. He was examined incessantly by the most re-nowned specialists of the age. His rolls were sent to himin separate sterilized paper bags so that they would be freefrom the wild, auto-intoxicating bacilli. He constantlytested his various juices and excretions. In those years hegot down untold gallons of sour milk and swallowedbillions of the beneficent bacilli of Bulgaria. . . .

And he died at the age of seventy-one.

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CHAPTER VIII

THEOBALD SMITHFields and Texas Fever

i

It was Theobald Smith who made mankind turn a corner.He was the first, and remains the captain of Americanmicrobe hunters. He poked his nose—following the reason-ing of some plain farmers—around a sharp turn and cameupon amazing things; and now this history tells whatSmith saw and what the trail-breakers who came after himfound.

“It is in the power of man to make parasitic maladiesdisappear from the face of the globe!” So promised Pas-teur, palsied but famous after his fight with the sicknessesof silkworms. He promised that, you remember, with akind of enthusiastic vehemence, making folks think theymight be rid of plagues by a year after next at the latest.Men began to hope and wait. . . . They cheered as Pasteurinvented vaccines—marvelous these were but not what youwould call microbc-cxtcrminators. Then Koch came, toastound men by his perilous science of finding the tuberclebacillus, and, though Koch promised little, men rememberedPasteur’s prophecy and waited for consumption to vanish.

. . . Years went by while Roux and Behring battled bloodilyto scotch the poison of diphtheria; mothers crooned hopefulsongs into the ears of their children. . . . Some men giggled,but secretly hoped a little too, that the mighty (albeitwindy) MetchnikofI might teach his phagocytes to cat upevery germ in the world. . . . Diseases were getting a bitmilder maybe—the reason is still mysterious--but they

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seemed in no hurry to vanish, and men had to keep onwaiting. . . .

Then arose a young man, Theobald Smith, at the open-ing of the last ten years of the eighteen hundreds, to showwhy northern cows get sick and die of Texas fever whenthey go south, and to explain why southern cows, thoughhealthy, go north and trail along with them a mysteriousdeath for northern cattle. In 1893 Theobald Smith wrotehis straight, clear report of the answer to this riddle; therewas certainly no public horn-tooting about it and the reportis now out of print—but that report gave an idea to theswashbuckling David Bruce; it gave hints to Patrick Man-son; it set thoughts flickering through the head of the bril-liant but indignant Italian, Grassi; that report gave confi-dence in his dangerous quest to the American Walter Reedand that gang of officers and gallant privates who refusedextra pay for the job of being martyrs to research.

What kind of man is this Theobald Smith (safe to sayill but a few thousand Americans have never even heard ofhim), and how could his discoveries about a cow diseaseset such dreams stirring—how could those farmer’s reason-ings that he proved, show microbe hunters a way to begin10 realize the poetic promise of Pasteur to men?

ii

In 1884 Theobald Smith was in his middle twenties; hewas a Bachelor of Philosophy of Cornell University; he wasa doctor of medicine from the Albany Medical College.But he detested the idea of going through life solemnlydiagnosing sicknesses he could not hope to cure, offeringsympathy where help wjs needed, trying to heal patientsfor whom there was no hope—in brief, medicine seemed tohim to be a mixed-up, illogical business. He was all forbiting into the unknown in places where there was a chance

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of swallowing it—a little of it—without having mentalindigestion. In short, though a physician, he wanted to doscience! In especial he was eager—as what searcher wasnot in those piping days—about microbes. At Cornell (itwas before the days of jazz) he had played psalms andBeethoven on the pipe organ; here too (college activitieshad not yet engulfed mere learning) Theobald Smith dugthoroughly into mathematics, into physical science, intoGerman, and particularly he became enthusiastic aboutlooking through microscopes. Maybe then he saw his firstmicrobe. . . .

But when he came to the medical school at Albany, hefound no excitement about possibly dastardly bacilli amongthe doctors of the faculty; germs had not yet been set upas targets for the healing shots of the medical profession;there was no course in bacteriology there—nor, for thatmatter, in any medical school in America. But he wantedto do science! And, caring nothing for the healthy drunk-ennesses and scientific obscenities of the ordinary medicalstudent, Theobald Smith soothed himself with the micro-scopic study of the interiors of cats. In his first pub-lished paper he made certain shrewd observations on pecu-liar twists of anatomy in the depths of the bellies of cats--that was his bow as a searcher.

He graduated and wanted above everything to be anexperimenter, but he had, before anything, to make a liv-ing. Just then young American doctors were hurrying toEurope, eager to look over Koch’s shoulder to learn waysto paint bacilli, to breed them true, to shoot them underthe skins of animals, and to talk like real experts aboutthem. Theobald Smith would have liked to go but he hadto find a job. And presently, while those other well-offyoung Americans were getting in on the ground floor ofthe new exciting science (afterward they rold how they

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had actually worked in the same room with those greatGermans!) and when they were getting ready to land im-portant professorships, Theobald Smith got his job. A hum-ble and surely not academically respectable job it was too!For he was appointed one of the stall of the then feeble,struggling, insignificant, financially rather ill-nourished, andin general almost negligible Bureau of Animal Industry atWashington. Counting Smith, there were four members ofthe staff of this Bureau. The Chief was a good man namedSalmon. He was enthusiastically interested in what germsmight do to cows and sincerely passionate about the im-portance of bacilli to pigs—but he knew nothing of how tofind the microbes harassing these valuable creatures. Thenthere was Mr. Kilborne who rejoiced in the degree ofBachelor of Agriculture and was something of a horse doc-tor (he now runs a hardware store in New York, up-statc).And finally, this staff to which Smith came, was glorifiedby the ancient and redoubtable Alexander, a darky ex-slavewho sat about solemnly, and when urged, got up to washthe dirty bottles or chaperon the guinea-pigs.

In a little room lighted by a dormer window under theroof in the attic of a government building. Smith set out tohunt microbes. It was his proper business! Naturally hewent at it, as if he had been born with a syringe in hishand and a platinum wire in his mouth. Though a univer'sity graduate, he read German well, and of nights, withgulps, he gobbled up the brave doings of Robert Koch; likea young duck taking to the water he began to imitateKoch’s subtle ways of nursing and waylaying hideous bacilliand those strange spirilla who swim about like living cork-screws. . . . “I owe everything to Robert Koch!” he said,and thought of that far-off genius as some country baseballslugger might think of Babe Ruth.

In his dingy attic he was tireless. It made no difference

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that he was not strong—all day and part of the night hehunted microbes. And he had musician’s fingers that helpedhim to brew microbe soups with very few spillings. In offmoments he would swat the regiments of cockroaches whomarched without stopping into his attic from the lumberroom close by. In a remarkably short time he had taughthimself everything needful and began to make cautiousdiscoveries—he invented a queer new safe kind of vaccine,which contained no bacilli but only their filtered formlessorotein stuff. The heat of his attic was an intensificationof the shimmering hell Washington knows how to be, buthe wiped the sweat from the end of his nose and set towork in the right, classic way of Koch—with an astoundinginstinct he avoided the cruder methods of Pasteur.

in

You talk about freedom of science! You think a freechoice to dig in any part of the Unknown is needed bysearchers? I used to think so, and I have got into troublewith eminent authorities for saying so—too loudly. Wrong!For Theobald Smith, with little more freedom to start withthan some low government clerk—had to research intothings Dr. Salmon told him to research at, and Dr. Salmonwas paid to direct Smith to solve puzzles which were both-ering the farmers and stock-raisers. Such was science in theBureau of Animal Industry. Dr. Salmon and BachelorKilborne and Theobald Smith—to say nothing of the in-dispensable Alexander—were expected to rush out likefiremen and squirt science on the flaming epidemics threat-ening the pigs and heifers and bulls and rams of the farmersof the land. Just then the stock-raisers were seriously upsetby a very weird disease, the Texas fever.

Southern cattlemen bought northern cattle; they wereunloaded from their box-cars and put to graze on the fields

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along with perfectly healthy southern cows; everythingwould go well for a month or so, and then, bang! anepidemic burst out among northern cows. They snippedeating, they lost dozens of pounds a day, their urine ranstrangely red, they stood aimless with arched backs andsad eyes—and in a few days every last one of the finenorthern herd lay stiff-legged on the field. The same thinghappened when southern steers and heifers were shippedNorth; they were put into northern fields, grazed thereawhile, were driven away perhaps; when northern cowswere turned into those fields where their southern sistershad been, in thirty days or so they began to die—in tendays after that a whole fine herd might be under theground.

What was this strange death, brought from the South bycattle never sick with it themselves, and left invisibly inambush on the fields? Why did it take more than amonth for those fields to become dangerous? Why werethey only dangerous in the hot summer months?

The whole country was excited about it; there was badfeeling between the meridional cowmen and their colleaguesof the North; New York City went into a panic whencarloads of stock shipped East for beef began to die inhundreds on the trains. Something must be done! And thedistinguished doctors of the Metropolitan Health Boardwent to work to try to find the microbe cause of thedisease. . . .

Meanwhile certain wise old Western cattle growers hada theory—it was just what you would call a plain hunchgot from smoking their pipes over disastrous losses of cows—they had a notion that Texas fever was caused by aninsect living on the cattle and sucking blood; this bugthey called a tic\.

The learned doctors of the Metropolitan Board and all of

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the distinguished horse doctors of the various state Experi-ment Stations laughed. Ticks cause disease! Any insectcause disease! It was unheard of. It was against all science.It was silly! . A little thought should have satisfiedany one of the absurdity of this idea,” pronounced thenoted authority, Gamgee. This man was up to his nosein the study of Texas fever, and never mentioned a tick;the scientists all over gravely cut up the carcasses of cowsand discovered bacilli there (but never saw a tick). “It isthe dung spreads it!” said one. “You are wrong, it is thesaliva!” said another. There were as many theories as therewere scientists. And the cattle kept on dying.

IV

Then, in 1888, Dr. Salmon put Theobald Smith, withKilborne to help him, and Alexander to clean up afterthem—saying nothing about ticks Salmon put his entirestaff to work on Texas fever. “Discover the germ!” he toldSmith. That year they had nothing but the spleens andlivers of four dead Texas fever cows to investigate; packedin pails of ice, from Virginia and Maryland to his furnace-like attic came those livers and spleens. Theobald Smithhad what so many of those mystified scientists and baffledhorse doctors lacked—horse sense. He turned his micro-scope on to different bits of the first sample of spleen; hespied microbes in it; there was a veritable menagerie ofdifferent species of them.

Then Smith sniffed at that bit of spleen. He wrinkledup his nose—it smelled It was spoiled.

At once he sent out messages, asking the stockmen toget the insides out of their cattle right away after theydied, to pack them quickly in ice, to see they got to thelaboratory more quickly. It was done, and m the next spleenhe found no microbes at all—but only a great quantity of

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mysteriously broken up red corpuscles of the blood. “Theylook wrecked!” he said. But he could find no microbes.He was still young, and sarcastic, and impatient with anysearcher who couldn’t do close hard thinking. A mannamed Billings had claimed a foolish common bacillus(which he found in every part of every dead cow and inevery corner of the b.irnyard—including the manure pile—as well) was the cause of Texas fever. Billings wrote aspread-eagle paper, saying: “The sun of original research,in disease, seems to be rising in the West instead of theEast!”

“Somewhat pompous claims,” said Smith, and he blewaway all that pseudo-scientific rubbish in a few drysentences. Smith knew it was no good sitting in a labora-tory, with no matter how many guinea-pigs and what anarray of fine syringes, simply to peer at the spleens andlivers of more or less odoriferous cows. He was an experi-menter; he must study the living disease; be there whilethe cows kicked their last quivering spasms; he must follownature. He began to get ready for the summer of 1889,when, one day, Kilborne told him of the cattlemen’s ridicu-lous theory about the ticks.

In a moment he pricked up his mental ears. “Thefarmers, the ones who lose the stock, who see most ofTexas fever, they think that?”

Now, though Theobald Smith was born in a city, he likedthe smell of hay just cut and the brown furrows of fresh-turned fields. There was something sage—something asnear as you can come to truth for him in a farmer’s clippedsentences about the crops or the weather. Smith was learnedin the marvelous shorthand of mathematics; men of thesoil don’t know that stuff. He was absolutely at homeamong the scopes and tubes and charts of shining labo-ratories—in short, this young searcher was full of sophisti-

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cated wisdom that laughs at common sayings, that oftenjeers at peasant platitudes. But in spite of all his learn-ing (and this was an arbitrary strange thing about him!)Theobald Smith did not confuse fine buildings and compli-cated apparatus with clear thinking—he seemed always tobe distrusting wh.it he got out of books or what he saw intubes. . . . He felt the dumbest yokel to be profoundlyright when that icllow took his torn-cob pipe from hismaybe unbrushed teeth to growl that April showersbrought May flowers.

He listened to Kilborne’s gossip about that idiotic theoryof ticks; Kilborne told him the cattlemen of the West werepretty well agreed it was ticks. Well, pondered Smith,those fellows were surely innocent of any fancy reasoningto corrupt their brains, they recked of the smell of steersand heifers, they were almost, you might say, a part oftheir animals; and they were the ones who had to layawake nights knowing this dreadful disease was turningtheir cattle’s blood to water, to taking the bread from theirchildren’s mouths. They had to bury those poor wastedbeasts. And these experienced farmers one and all said: “NoMcks—no Texas fever!”

Theobald Smith would follow the farmers. He wouldwatch the disease as nearly as possible as those stockmenhad watched it. Here was a new kind of microbe hunting—following nature, and changing her by just the smallesttricks. . . . The summer of 1889 came, the days grew hot;the year before the cattlemen had complained bitterly abouttheir losses. It was urgent to do something, even the gov-ernment saw that. The Department of Agricultureloosened up with a good appropriation, and Dr. Salmon,the Director, directed that the work begin—luckily heknew so little about experiments that his direction neverbothered Smith in the slightest.

V

With Kilborne, Theobald Smith now built an outlandishlaboratory, not between four walls but under the hot sky,and the rooms of that place of science were nothing morethan five or six little dusty fenced off fields. On June 27of 1889, seven rather thin but perfectly healthy cows cameoff a little boat which brought them from farms in NorthCarolina, from the heart of the Texas fever country, whereit was death for northern cattle to go. And these sevencows were, one and all of them, decorated, infested andplagued by several thousands of ticks, assorted sizes ofthem, some so tiny they needed a magnifying glass to beseen—and then there were splendid female ticks half aninch long, puffed up with blood sucked from their long-suffering hosts.

Into securely fenced Field No. t. Smith and Kilbornedrove four of these tick-loaded southern cattle, and with

them they put six healthy northern beasts “pretty soon

the northerners will be getting the ticks on them too, theyhave never been near Texas fever. . . . They are susceptible,and then . . .?” said Smith. “And now for a little trick tosee if it is the ticks we have to blame!”

So Theobald Smith did his first little trick—call it anexperiment if you wish—it was a stunt a shrewd cattlemanmight have thought of if he hadn’t been too busy to try it;it was an experiment all other American scientists consideredit silly to attempt. Smith and Kilborne set out to pick off,with their hands, every single tick from the remaining threesouthern cattle! The beasts kicked and switched their tailsin these strange experimenters’ faces; it was way over ahundred in the sun, and the dust from the rampaging ofthe offended cows hung in clouds around them and stuckto their sweaty foreheads. Buried away under the matted

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hair of the cattle hid those ticks, and the little ones out inthe open seemed to crawl away under the hair when thecramped fingers of the searchers went after them. And howthose damned parasites stuck to their cow-hosts—there weremagnificent blood-gorged lady ticks who mashed up intonasty messes when you tried to pull them off—it was amiserable business!

But toward evening of that day they could find never atick on any of those three North Carolina cows, and intoField No. 2 they put them, along with four healthy north-ern beasts. “These northerners, perfectly fit for a fatalattack of Texas fever, will be rubbing noses with the south-erners, will be nibbling the same grass, drinking from thesame water, sniffing at the North Carolina cow’s excretions—but they’ll get no ticks from them. Well—now to waitand see if it’s the ticks who are to blame!”

July and the first of August were two months of hot butstrenuous waiting. Smith, with a Government bug-expertnamed Cooper Curtice, kept himself busy with vast studiesof the lives and works and ways of ticks. They discoveredhow a six-legged baby tick climbs up onto a cow, how itfastens itself to the cow’s hide, begins to suck blood, shedsits skin, proudly acquires two more legs, sheds its skinagain; they found out the eight-legged females then marry(on the cow’s back) each of them a little male, how thelady-ticks then have great feasts of blood, grow to tickwomanhood—and at last drop off the cow to the groundto lay their two thousand or more eggs; so, hardly morethan twenty days after their journey up the leg of the cow,their mission in life is done, and they shrivel up and die—while strange doings begin in each of those two thousandeggs. ...

Meanwhile, every day—it was a relief to get out of thatcockroachy attic even to those burning fields—Theobald

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Smith journeyed out to his open air laboratory whereKilborne the future hardware dealer was in command. Hewent to Field No. i to see if ticks had got on to any ofthe northern cattle yet, to see if they were getting hot,if their heads drooped; he crossed over to Field No. 2 topick a few more ticks off those three North Carolina cows—a few new ones always seemed to be popping up, grownfrom ones too small to see that first day!—it was nervousbusiness, making sure those three cows stayed clean of ticks.... It was, to tell the truth, a perspiring and not too in-teresting waiting until that day a little past the middle ofAugust, when the first northern cow began to show ticks,and presently to stand with her back arched, refusing toeat. Then the ticks appeared on all the northerners; theyburned with fever, their blood turned to water, their ribsstuck out and their flanks grew bony—and ticks? 7"heyseemed to be alive with ticks!

But on Field No. 2, where there were no ticks, thenorthern cows stayed as healthy as their North Carolinamates. . . .

Each day the fever of the northern beasts in Field No. 1went higher—then one by one they died; the barns ran redwith the blood of the post mortems, and there were rush-ings to and fro between the dead beasts on the field andthe microscopes in the attic—even Alexander, dimly sensingthe momentous things afoot, even Alexander got busy. AndTheobald Smith looked at the thin blood of the dead cows.“It is the blood the unknown Texas fever microbe attacks—something seems to get into the blood corpuscles of thecows and burst them open—it is inside the blood cells Imust look for the germ,” pondered Smith. Now, though hedistrusted the reports of alleged microscope experts, he wasnevertheless himself mighty sharp with this machine. Heturned his most powerful lens onto the blood of the first

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cow that died, and—here was luck!—in the very first speci-men he spied queer little punched-out pear-shaped spaces inthe otherwise solid discs of the blood corpuscles. At firstthey simply looked like holes, but he focussed up and down,2nd fussed, and looked at a dozen thin bits of glass withblood between them. Presently these spaces began to turninto queer pear-shaped living creatures for him. In the bloodof every beast dead of Texas fever he found them—alwaysinside the corpuscles, wrecking the corpuscles, turning theblood to water. Never did he find them in the blood of ahealthy northern cow. . . . “It may be the microbe of Texasfever,” he whispered, but like a good peasant he did notjump to conclusions—he must look at the blood of a hun-dred cows, sick and healthy, lie must examine millions ofred blood cells to be sure. . . .

By now the hottest weather had passed, it was September,and in Field No. 2, the northern cattle, all four of them,kept on grazing and grew fat—there were no ticks there.And Smith muttered: “We’ll see if it’s the ticks who areto blame!” and he took two of these unharmed northernbeasts and led them into Field No. 1, where so many beastshad died—in a week a few of the little red-brown bugswere crawling up these new cow’s legs. In a little morethan two weeks one of these cows was dead, and the othersick, of Texas fever.

But there never was a man who needed more experiencesto convince him of something he wanted to believe. Hemust be sure! And there was still another simple trick hecould try—call it an experiment if you wish. From NorthCarolina, from the fatal fields down there, came large cansind these cans were filled with grass, that swarmed withticks, crawling, thirsty for the blood of cows. These cansTheobald Smith took on to Field No. where no southernbattle or their bloor 1-sucking parasites had ever been, and he

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plodded up and down this field, and all over it he sowedhis maybe fatal seed—of ticks. Then four northern cattlewere led by Kilborne on to this field—and in a few weekstheir blood ran thin, and one died, and two of the temain-ing three had severe bouts of Texas fever but recovered.

vr

So, first of all microbe hunters, Theobald Smith tracedout the exact path by which a sub-visible assassin goes fromone animal to another. In the field where there were south-ern cattle and ticks, the northern cattle died of Texas fever;‘ii the field where there were southern cattle without ticksthe northern cows grew fat and remained happy; in thefield where there were no southern cattle but only ticks—here too. the northern cattle came down with Texas fever.It must be the tick. By such simple, two-plus-two-make-four—but oh! what endlessly careful experiments, TheobaldSmith proved those western cowmen to have observed agreat new fact of nature. . . . He chiseled that fact out of1 oik-shrewdness, just as the anonymous invention of thewheel has been taken out of folk-inventiveness and put tothe uses of modern whirring dynamos. . . .

You would think he thought he had proved enough—those experiments were so clear. You would think he wouldhave advised the government to start an exterminating waron ticks, but that was not the kind of searcher TheobaldSmith was. Instead, he waited for the heat of the summerof 1890 to come, and then he started doing the same experi-ments over, and some new ones too, all of them simpletricks, but each of them necessary to nail down the factthat the tick was the real criminal. “How do those bugscarry the disease from a southern cow to a northern one?”he pondered. “We know now one tick lives its whole lifeon just one cow—it doesn’t flit from beast to beast like a

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fly. . . This was a knotty question—too subtle for thecrude science of the ranchers—and Smith set himself tochew that knot. . . .

“It must be,” he meditated, “that ticks, when they havesucked enough blood, and are ripe, drop off, and arecrushed, and leave the little pear-shaped microbes on thegrass—to be eaten by the northern cattle!”

So he took thousands of ticks, sent up in those cans fromNorth Carolina, and mixed them with hay, and fed themto a susceptible northern cow kept carefully in a specialstable. But nothing happened; the cow seemed to relishher new food; she got fat. He tried drenching anothercow with mashed up ticks made into a soup—but thatcow too seemed to enjoy her strange dose. She prosperedon it.

It was no go—cows didn’t, apparently, get the microbeby eating ticks; he was mixed up for a while. And otherplaguey questions kept him awake nights. Why was itthat it took thirty days or more, after the southern tick-loaded cows came on the field, for such a field to becomedangerous? Stockmen knew this too; they knew they couldmix just-arrived southern cows with northern ones, andkeep them together twenty days or so, and then if they tookthe northern ones away—they would never get Texas fever;but if you left them in that field a little longer (even if thesouthern cows were taken away) bang! would come thefatal epidemic into the herd of northerners. That was aposer!

Then one day in this summer of 1890, by the moststrange, the most completely unforeseen of accidents, everyjagged piece of the puzzle fell into its proper place. Thesolution of the riddle fairly clubbed Theobald Smith; ityelled at him; it forced itself on him while he was busydoing other things. He was at all kinds of experiments just

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then; he was bleeding northern cows for gallons of bloodto give them an anemia—to make sure those funny littlepear-shaped objects he had found in the corpuscles of Texasfever cattle were microbes, and not simply little changes inblood that might come from anemia. He was learning tohatch nice clean young ticks artificially in glass dishes inhis laboratory; he was still laboriously picking ticks offsouthern cows—and sometimes he failed to get them all of!and the experiments went wrong—to prove that ticklesssouthern cows are harmless to northern ones; he was dis-covering the strange fact that northern calves get only amild fever on a field fatal to their mothers. He fussed aboutfinding every single effect a tick might have on a northerncow—it might do other damages besides giving her Texasfever . . . ?

Then came that happy accident. He asked himself: “IfI should put good clean young ticks, hatched in glass dishesin my attic, ticks who never have been on cattle or on adangerous field—if I should put such ticks on a northerncow and let them suck their fill of her blood—could thoseticks take out enough blood to give the cow an anemia?”It seems to me to have been an aimless question. Histhoughts were a thousand miles away from Texasfever. . . .

But he tried it. He took a good fat yearling heifer, puther in a box-stall, and day after day put hundreds of cleanbaby ticks on her, holding her while these varmints crawledaway beneath her hair to get a good grip on her hide.Then day after day, while the ticks made their meals, hecut little gashes in her skin to get a drop of blood to seeif she was becoming anemic. And one morning TheobaldSmith came into her stall—fot the usual routine—he puthis hand on that heifer. . . . What was this? She felt hot!Very hot! Suspiciously too hot! She drooped her head,

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and would not eat—and her blood which before had welledout from the gashes thick and rich and red—that bloodran very thin and darkish. He hurried back to his atticwith samples of the blood between little pieces of glass. . . .Under the microscope it went, and sure enough!—here weretwisted, jagged, wrecked blood corpuscles instead of goodeven round ones with edges smooth as a worn dime. Andinside these broken cells—it was fantastical, this business!—were the little pear-shaped microbes. . . . Here was thefact, stranger than any pipe-dream—for these microbes musthave come up from North Carolina on old ticks, had goneout of the old ticks into the eggs they had laid in the glassdishes, they had survived in the baby ticks hatched out ofthese eggs—and these babies had at last shot them back,ready to kill, into their destined but completely accidentalvictim, that yearling heifer!

In a flash all those mysterious questions cleared up forTheobald Smith.

It was not the old, blood-stuffed tick but its child, thebaby tick, who sneaked the assassin into the northern cows;it was this little five- or ten-day-old bug who carried themurderer.

Now he saw why it was that fields took so long to be-come dangerous—the mother ticks have to drop off thesouthern cattle; it takes them some days to lay their eggs;these eggs take twenty days or more to hatch; the tickbabies have to scamper about to find a cow’s leg to crawlup on—all that takes many days, weeks. Never was there asimpler answer to a problem which, without this strangechance, might not yet be solved. . . .

So soon as he could hatch out other thousands of ticks inwarm glass dishes, Theobald Smith proceeded to confirmhis marvelous discovery; he proved it clean. For every north-ern cow, on whom he stuck his regiments of incubator

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ticks, came down with Texas fever. But he was a gluttonfor proofs, as you have seen, and when the summer of1890 waned and it grew cold, he installed a coal-stove in astable, hatched the ticks in a heated place, put a cow inthe hot stable, stuck the little ticks diligently onto the hideof the cow, the stove instead of the sun made them growas they should—and the cow got Texas fever in the winter,a thing which never happens in nature!

For two more summers Smith and Kilborne trampedabout their fields, caulking up every seam in the ship oftheir research, answering every argument, devising astounding simple but admirably adequate answers to every objec-tion the savant horse doctors might make—before these crit-ics ever had a chance to make objections. They foundstrange facts about immunity. They saw northern calvesget mild attacks of Texas fever, a couple of attacks in onesummer maybe, and then next year, more or less grown up.graze unconcerned on fields absolutely murderous to a non-immune northern cow. ... So they explained why south-ern cattle never die of Texas fever. This fell disease iseverywhere that ticks are in the South—and ticks ire every-where; ticks are biting southern cattle and shooting thefatal queer pears into them all the time; these cattle carrythe microbes about with them in their blood—but itdoesn’t matter, for the little sickness in their Ctdfhood hasmade them immune.

Finally, after four of these stifling but triumphant sum-mers, Theobald Smith sat down, in 1893, to answer all theperplexing questions about Texas fever—and to tell howthe disease can be absolutely wiped out (just then the an-cient Pasteur who had prophesied that about all diseasewas getting ready to die). Never—and 1 do not forget themasterpieces of Leeuwenhoek or Koch or any genius in theline of microbe hunters—never, I say, has there been writ-

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ten a more simple but at the same time more solid answerto an enigma of nature. A bright boy could understand it;Isaac Newton would have taken of! his hat to it. He lovedBeethoven, did young Smith, and for me this “Investiga-tion into the Nature, Causation, and Prevention of Texasor Southern Cattle Fever” has the quality of that EighthSymphony of Beethoven’s sour later years. Absurdly sim-ple in their themes they both are, but unearthly varied andcomplete in the working out of those themes—just as na-ture is at once simple and infinitely complex. . . .

VII

And so, with this report, Theobald Smith made mankindturn a corner, showed men an entirely new and fantasticway a disease may be carried—by an insect. And only bythat insect. Wipe out that insect, dip all of your cattle tokill all their ticks, keep your northern cattle in fields wherethere are no ticks, and Texas fever will disappear from theearth. To-day whole states are dipping their cattle and to-day Texas fever which once threatened the great myriadsof American cattle is no longer a matter for concern. Butthat is only the beginning of the beneficent deeds of thisplain report, this classic unappreciated and completely outof print. For presently, on the veldt and in the dangerousbush of southern Africa, a burly Scotch surgeon-majorswore at the bite of a tsetse fly—and wondered what elsebesides merely annoying one, these tsetse flies might do.And a little later in India, and at the same time in Italy,an Englishman and an Italian listened to the whining songof swarms of mosquitoes, and dreamed and wondered andplanned strange experiments

But those are the stories the next chapters will celebrate.They tell of ancient plagues now in reach of mankind’scomplete control—they tell of a deadly yellow disease now

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almost entirely abolished. They tell of men projecting pic-tures of swarming human life and turreted cities of the fu-ture reaching up and up, built on jungles now fit only forman-killing wild beasts and lizards. It was this now nea rlyforgotten microbe hunting of Theobald Smith that firstgave men the right to have visions of a world transformed.

CHAPTER IX

BRUCE

Trail of the Tsetse

“Young man!”—the face of the Director-General of theBritish Army Medical Service changed from an irritatedred to an indignant mauve-color—“young man, I will sendyou to India, 1 will send you to Zanzibar, I will send youto Timbuctoo—1 will send you anywhere I please”—(them ljestic old gentleman was shouting now, and his facewas a positively furious purple) “but you may be damnedsure 1 shall not send you to Natal! . . Reverbera-tions. . . .

What could David Bruce do, blit salute, and withdrawfrom his Presence? He had schemed, he had begged, andpulled wires, finally he had dared the anger of this Jupiter,so that he might go hunt microbes in South Africa. It wasin the early eighteen nineties; Theobald Smith, in America,had just made that revolutionary jump ahead in microbehunting—he had just shown how death may be carried bya tick, and only by a tick, from one animal to another.And now this David Bruce, physically as adventurous asTheobald Smith was mildly professorial, wanted to turnthat corner after Smith. . . . Africa swarmed with mysteri-

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jus viruses that made the continent a hell to live in; inthe olive-green mimosa thickets and the jungle hummedand sizzled a hundred kinds of flies and ticks and gnats.. . . What a place for discoveries, for swashbuckling micro-scopings and lone-wolf bug-huntings Africa must be!

It was in the nature of David Bruce to do things his su-periors and elders didn’t want him to do. Just out of med-ical school in Edinburgh, he had joined the British ArmyMedical Service, not to fight, nor to save lives, nor (at thattime) to get a chance to hunt microbes—not for any suchnoble objects. He had joined it because he wanted tomarry. They hadn’t a shilling, neither Bruce nor his sweet-heart; their folks called them thirteen kinds of romanticidiots—why couldn’t they wait until David had establishedhimself in a nice practice ?

So Bruce joined the army, and married on a salary ofone thousand dollars a year.

In certain ways he was not a model soldier. He was dis-obedient, and, what is much worse, tactless. Still a lieuten-ant, he one day disapproved of the conduct of his colonel,and offered to knock him down. ... If you could see himnow, past seventy, with shoulders of a longshoreman and abarrel-chest sloping down to his burly equator, if you couldhear him swear through a mustache Hindenburg would beproud to own, you would understand he could, had itbeen necessary, have put that colonel on his back, andlaughed at the court-martial that would have been sure tofollow. He was ordered to the English garrison on the Is-land of Malta in the Mediterranean; with him went Mrs.Bruce—it was their honeymoon. Here again he showedhimself to be things soldiers seldom are. He was energetic,as well as romantic. There was a mysteriqus disease in theisland. It was called Malta fever. It was an ill that sentpains up and down the shin bones of soldiers and made

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them curse the day they took the Queen’s shilling. Brucesaw it was silly to sit patting the heads of these sufferers,and futile to prescribe pills for them—he must find thecause of Malta fever!

So he got himself into a mess. In an abandoned shackhe set up a laboratory (little enough he knew about labora-tories!) and here he spent weeks learning how to make aculture medium, out of beef broth and agar-agar, to growthe unknown germ of Malta fever in. It ought to be sim-ple to discover it. His ignorance made him think that; andin his inexperience he got the sticky agar-agar over handsand face; it stained his uniform; the stuff set into obstinatejelly when he tried to filter it; lie spent weeks doing a joba modern laboratory helper would accomplish in a coupleof hours. He said unmentionable things; he called Mrs.Bruce from the tennis lawn, and demanded (surely anywoman knew better how to cook) that she help him. Outof his thousand dollars a year he bought monkeys—improv-idcntly—at one dollar and seventy-five cents apiece. Hetried to inject the blood of the tortured soldiers into thesecreatures; but they wriggled out of his hands and bit himand scratched him and were in general infernally livelynuisances. He called to his wife: “Will you hold this mon-key for me?”

That was the way she became his assistant, and as youwill see, for thirty years she remained his right hand, goingwith him into the most pestilential dirty holes any microbehunter has ever seen, sharing his poverty, beaming on hisobscure glories; she was so important to his tremendousbut not notorious conquests. . . .

They were such muddlers at first, it is hard to believe it,but together these newly-wed bacteriologists worked anddiscovered the microbe of Malta fever—and were orderedfrom Malta for their pains. “What was Bruce up to, any-

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way?” So asked the high medical officers of the garrison.“Why wasn’t he treating the suffering soldiers—what forwas he sticking himself away there in the hole he calledhis laboratory?” And they denounced him as an idiot, avisionary, a good-for-nothing monkey-tamer and dabblerwith test-tubes. And just—he did do this twenty yearslater—as he might have discovered how the little bacillusof Malta fever sneaks from the udders of goats into theblood of British Tommies, he was ordered away to Egypt.

Then he was ordered back to England, to the ArmyMedical School at Netley, to teach microbe hunting there—for hadn’t he discovered the germ of an important disease?Here he met (at last God was good to him) His Excel-lency, the Honorable Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, Gover-nor of Natal and Zululand, et cetera, et cetera. Togetherthese two adventurers saw visions and made plans. His Ex-cellency knew nothing about microbes and had perhapsnever heard of Theobald Smith—but he had a colonial ad-ministrator’s dream of Africa buzzing with prosperity un-der the Union Jack. Bruce cared no fig for expansion ofthe Empire, but he knew there must be viruses sneakingfrom beast to beast and man to man on the stingers ofbugs and flies. He wanted (and so did Mrs. Bruce) to in-vestigate strange diseases in impossible places.

It was then that he, only a brash captain, went to themajestic Director-General, and I have just told how he wasdemolished. But even Directors-General cannot rememberthe uppish wishes of all of their pawns and puppets; direc-tors may propose, but adroit wire-pulling sometimes dis-poses, and presently in 1894, Surgeon-Major David Bruceand Mrs. Bruce are in Natal, traveling by ox-team ten miles

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a day towards Ubombo in Zululand. The temperature inthe shade of their double-tent often reached 106; swarms oftsetse flies escorted them, harassed them, flopped on themwith the speed of express trains and stung them like littleadders; they were howled at by hyenas and growled at bylions. . . . They spent part of every night scratching tickbites. . . . But Bruce and his wife, the two of them, werethe First British Nagana Commission to Zululand. So theywere happy.

They were commanded to find out everything about thedisease called nagana—the pretty native name for an un-known something that made great stretches of SouthAfrica into a desolate place, impossible to farm in, danger-ous to hunt big game in, suicidal to travel in. Naganameans “depressed and low in spirits.” Nagana steals intofine horses and makes their eyes stare and their hair fallout; while the fat of these horses melts away nagana growswatery pouches on their bellies and causes a thin rheum todrip from their noses; a milky film spreads over their eyesand they go blind; they droop, and at last die—every lasthorse touched by the nagana dies. It was the same withcattle. Farmers tried to improve their herds by importingnew stock; cows sent to them fat and in prime conditioncame miserably to their kraals—to die of nagana. Fatdroves of cattle, sent away to far-off slaughter-houses, ar-rived there hairless, hidebound skeletons. There werestrange belts of country through which it was death foranimals to go. And the big game hunters! They wouldstart into these innocent-seeming thickets with their horsesand pack-mules; one by one—in certain regions mind you—their beasts wilted under them. When these hunters triedto hoof it back, sometimes they got home.

Bruce and Mrs. Bruce came at last to Ubombo—it was asettlement on a high hill, looking east toward the Indian

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Ocean across sixty miles of plain, and the olive-green of themimosa thickets of this plain was slashed with the vividgreen of blades of grass. On the hill they set up their lab-oratory; it consisted of a couple of microscopes, a few glassslides, some knives and syringes and perhaps a few dozentest-tubes—smart young medical students of to-day wouldstick up their noses at such a kindergarten affair! Herethey set to work, with sick horses and cattle brought upfrom the plain below—for Providence had so arranged itthat beasts could live on the barren hill of Ubombo, abso-lutely safe from nagana, but just let a farmer lead themdown into the juicy grass of that fertile plain, and thechances were ten to one they would die of nagana beforethey became fat on the grass. Bruce shaved the ears of ththorses and jabbed them with a scalpel, a drop of bloodwelled out and Mrs. Bruce, dodging their kicks, touchedoff the drops onto thin glass slides.

It was hot. Their sweat dimmed the lenses of their mi-croscopes; they rejoiced in necks cramped from hours oflooking; they joked about their red-rimmed eyes. Theygave strange nicknames to their sick cows and horses, theylearned to talk some Zulu. It was as if there were no Di-rectors-General or superior officers in existence, and Brucefelt himself for the first time a free searcher.

And very soon they made their first step ahead: in theblood of one of their horses, sick to death, Bruce spied aviolent unwonted dancing among the faintly yellow, piled-up blood corpuscles; he slid his slide along the stage of hismicroscope, till he came to an open space in the jungle ofblood cells. . . .

There, suddenly, popped into view the cause of the com-motion—a curious little beast (much bigger than any ordi-nary microbe though), a creature with a blunt rear-endand a long slim lashing whip with which he seemed to ex-

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plore in front of him. A creature shaped like a panatelacigar, only it was flexible, almost tying itself in knots some-times, and it had a transparent graceful fin running thelength of its body. Another of the beasts swam into theopen space under the lens, and another. What extraordi-nary creatures! They didn’t go stupidly along like commonmicrobes—they acted like intelligent little dragons. Eachone of them darted from one round red blood cell to an-other; he would worry at it, try to get inside it, tug at itand pull it, push it along ahead of him—then suddenly offhe would go in a straight line and bury himself under amass of the blood cells lining the shore of the openspace. . . .

“Trypanosomes—these are!” cried Bruce, and he hurriedto show them to his wife. In all animals sick with naganathey found these finned beasts, in the blood they were, andin the fluid of their puffy eyelids, and in the strange yel-lowish jelly that replaced the fat under their skins. Andnever a one of them could Bruce find in healthy dogs andhorses and cows. But as the sick cattle grew sicker, thesevicious snakes swarmed more and more thickly in theirblood, until, when the animals lay gasping, next to death,the microbes writhed in them in quivering masses, so thatyou would swear their blood was made up of nothing else.

. . . It was horrible!

But how did these trypanosomes get from a sick beast toa healthy one? “Here on the hill we can keep healthy ani-mals in the same stables with the sick ones—and never aone of the sound animals comes down . . . here on thehill no cow or horse has ever been known to get nagana!”muttered Bruce. “Why? . .

He began to dream experiments, when the long arm ofthe Authorities—maybe it was that dear old Director-Gen-eral remembering—found him again: Surgeon-Major Bruce

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was to proceed to Pietermaritzburg for duty in the typhoidepidemic raging there.

Only five weeks they had been at this work, when theystarted back to Pietermaritzburg, ten miles a day by ox-team through the jungle. He started treating soldiers fortyphoid fever, but as usual—thief that he was—he stoletime to try to find out something about typhoid fever, in alaboratory set up, since there was no regular one, of allplaces—in the morgue. There in the sickening vapors ofthe dead-house Bruce puttered in snatched moments, gottyphoid fever himself, nearly died, and before he got thor-oughly better was sent out as medical officer to a filibuster-ing expedition got up to “protect” a few thousand squaremiles more of territory for the Queen. It looked like theend for him, Hely-Hutchinson’s wires got tangled—thereseemed no chance ever to work at nagana again; when theexpedition had pierced a couple of hundred miles into thejungle, all of the horses and mules of this benevolent littlearmy up and died, and what was left of the men had totry to hoof it back. A few came out, and David Brucewas among the lustiest of those gaunt hikers. . . .

Nearly a year had been wasted. But who can blamethose natural enemies of David Bruce, the High Authori-ties, for keeping him from research? They looked at him;they secretly trembled at his burliness and his mustachesand his air of the Berserker. This fellow was born for asoldier! But they were so busy, or forgot, and presentlyHely-Hutchinson did his dirty work again, and in Septem-ber, 1895, Bruce and his wife got back to Ubombo, to tryto untangle the knot of how nagana gets from a sick ani-mal to a healthy one. And here Bruce followed, for thefirst time, Theobald Smith around that corner. . . . Like

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Theobald Smith, Bruce was a man to respect and to testfolk-hunches and superstitions. He respected the beliefs offolks, himself he had no fancy super-scientific thoughtsand never talked big words—yes, he respected suchhunches—but he must test them!

“It is the tsetse flies cause nagana,” said some experiencedEuropeans. “Flies bite domestic animals and put somekind of poison in them.”

“Nagana is caused by big game,” said the wise Zuluchiefs and medicine men. “The discharges of the buffalo,the quagga, and waterbuck, the koodoo—these contaminatethe grass and the watering places—so it is horses and cattleare hit by the nagana.”

“But why do we always fail to get our horses safethrough the fly country—why is nagana called the fly dis-ease?” asked the Europeans.

“Why, it’s easy to get animals through the fly belt solong as you don’t let them eat or drink!” answered theZulus.

Bruce listened, and then proceeded to try out both ideas.He took good healthy horses, and tied heavy canvas bagsround their noses so they couldn’t eat nor drink; he ledthem down the hill to the pleasant-looking midday hell inthe mimosa thickets; here he kept them for hours. Whilehe watched to see they didn’t slip their nose bags, swarmsof pretty brown and gold tsetses buzzed around them—flopped on to the kicking horses and in twenty secondsswelled themselves up into bright balloons of blood. . . .The world seemed made of tsetse flics, and Bruce wavedhis arms. “They were enough to drive one mad!” he toldme, thirty years afterward. I can see him, talking to thosepests in the language of a deck-foreman, to the wonder ofhis Zulus. Day after day this procession of Bruce, the Zu-lus, and the experimental horses went down into the

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thorns, and each afternoon, as the sun went down behindUbombo, Bruce and his migrating experiment grunted andsweated back up the hill.

Then, in a little more than fifteen days, to the delight ofBruce and his wife, the first of those horses who had servedas a fly-restaurant turned up seedy in the morning andhung his head. And in the blood of this horse appearedthe vanguard of the microscopic army of finned wee devils—that tussled so intelligently with the red blood cells. . . .

So it was with every horse taken down into the mimosa—and not one of them had eaten a blade of grass nor hadone swallow of water down there; one and all they diedof the nagana.

“Good, but it is not proved yet, one way or another,”said Bruce. “Even if the horses didn’t eat or drink, theymay have inhaled those trypanosomes from the air—that’sthe way the greatest medical authorities think malaria ispassed on from one man to the next—though it soundslike rot to me.” But for Bruce nothing was rot until ex-periment proved it rot. “Here’s the way to see,” he cried.“Instead of taking the horses down, I’ll bring the fliesup!”

So he bought more healthy horses, kept them safe onthe hill, thousands of feet above the dangerous plain, thenonce more he went down the hill—how that man loved tohunt, even for such idiotic game as flies!—and with him hetook a decoy horse. The tsetses landed on the horse; Bruceand the Zulus picked them off gently, hundreds of them,and stuck them into an ingenious cage, made of muslin.Then back up the hill, to clap the cage buzzing with flieson to the back of a healthy horse. Through a clever glasswindow in one of the cage-sides they watched the greedybrutes make their meal by sticking their stingers throughthe muslin. And in less than a month it was the same

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with these horses, who had never eaten, nor drunk, noreven inhaled the air of the plain—every one died of thenagana.

How they worked, Bruce and his wife! They post-mor-temed dead horses; they named a sick horse “The Uni-corn” and tried to keep him alive with arsenic. To findout how long a tsetse fly can carry the trypanosomes onhis stinger they put cages of flies on sick dogs and then atintervals of hours, and days, let them feed on healthy ones.They fed dying heifers hot pails of coffee, mercifully theyshot dogs thinned by the nagana to sad bags of bones.Mrs. Bruce sterilized silk threads, to dip in blood swarmingwith trypanosomes, then sewed these threads under thehides of healthy dogs—to find out how long such bloodmight remain deadly. . . . There was now no doubt thetsetse flies, and only the flies, could carry the nagana, andnow Bruce asked:

“But where do the tsetses of the plain get the trypano-somes they stick into cows and horses? In those fly beltsthere are often no horses or cattle sick with nagana, formonths. Surely the flies [he was wrong here] can’t stayinfected for months—it must be they get them from thewild animals, the big game!” That was a possibility afterhis heart. Here was a chance to do something else than sitat a microscope. He forgot instantly about the more pa-tient, subtle jobs that demanded to be done—teasing jobs,for a little man, jobs like tracing the life of the trypano-somes in the flies. . . . “The microbes must be in game!”and he buckled on his cartridge belt and loaded his guns.Into the thickets he went, and shot Burchell’s zebras; hebrought down koodoos and slaughtered water-bucks. Heslashed open the dead beasts and from their hot heartssucked up syringes full of blood, and jogged back up thehill with them. He looked through his microscopes for

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trypanosomes in these bloods—but didn’t find them. Butthere was a streak of the dreamer in him. “They may bethere, too few to sec,” he muttered, and to prove they werethere he shot great quantities of the blood from ten differ-ent animals into healthy dogs. So he discovered that thenagana microbes may lurk in game, waiting to be carriedto gentler beasts by the tsetse. So it was Bruce made thefirst step towards the opening up of Africa.

IV

And Hely-Hutchinson saw how right he had been aboutDavid Bruce. “ ’Ware the tsetse fly,” he told his farmers,“kill the tsetse fly, clear the thickets in which it likes tobreed—drive out, exterminate the antelope from which itsucks the trypanosomes.” So Bruce began ridding Africa ofnagana.

Then came the Boer War. Bruce and Mrs. Bruce foundthemselves besieged in Ladysmith with nine thousand otherEnglishmen. There were thirty medical officers in the gar-rison—but not one surgeon. With each whine and burst oithe shells from the Boer’s “Long Tom” the rows of thewounded grew—there were moanings, and a horrid stenchfrom legs that should be amputated. . . . “Think of it!Not one of those medicoes could handle a knife! Myself, Iwas only a laboratory man,” said Bruce, “but I had cut upplenty of dogs and guinea-pigs and monkeys—so why notsoldiers? There was one chap with a bashed-up knee . . .well, they chloroformed him, and while they were at that,I sat in the next room reading Treve’s Surgery on how totake out a knee-joint. Then I went in and did it—wesaved his leg.” So Bruce became Chief Surgeon, andfought and starved, nearly to death, with the rest. What aboy that Bruce was! In 1924 in Toronto, in a hospital ashe lay propped up, a battered bronchitic giant, telling me

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this story, his bright eye belied his skin wrinkled and thecolor of old parchment—and there was no doubt he was asproud of his slapdash surgery and his sulky battles withthe authorities, as of any of his discoveries in microbehunting. He chuckled through phlegm that gurgled deepin his ancient air-tubes: “Those red-tape fellows—I alwayshad to fight their red-tape—until at last I got too str-r-rongfor them!”

Presently, two years after Ladysmith, he became strongerthan they—and they came asking him to hunt mi-crobes. . . .

For death was abroad on the shores of Lake VictoriaNyanza, in Central Africa, on the Equator. It crept, itjumped, it kept popping up in new villages, it was in away a very merciful death—though slow—for it was with-out pain, turning from a fitful fever into an unconquerablelaziness strange to see in the busy natives of the lake shore;it passed, this death, from lethargy into a ridiculous sleepi-ness that made the mouths of the negroes fall open whilethey ate; it went at last from such a drowsiness into a deli-cious coma—no waking from this!—and into a horrible un-natural coldness that merged with the chill of the grave.Such was the African sleeping sickness. In a few years ithad killed hundreds of thousands of the people of Uganda,it had sent brave missionaries to meet their God, and Eng-lish colonial administrators home to their final slumber. Itwas turning the most generous soil on earth back into anunproductive preserve for giraffes and hyenas. The BritishColonial Office was alarmed; shareholders began to fear forthcii dividends; natives—those who were left—began toleave their villages of shaggy, high-pitched, thatch-roofedhuts. And the scientists and doctors ?

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Well, the scientists and doctors were working at it. Uptill now the wisest ones were as completely ignorant ofwhat was this sleeping death as the blackest trader in ba-nanas was ignorant. No one could tell how it stole from ablack father to his neighbor’s dusky pickaninnies. But nowthe Royal Society sent out a commission made up of threesearchers; they sailed for Uganda and began researcheswith the blood and spinal fluid of unhappy black mendoomed with this drowsy death.

They groped; they sweat in the tropic heat; they formeddifferent opinions: one was pretty sure a curious long wormthat he found in the black men’s blood was the cause ofthis death; a second had no definite opinion that I knowof; the third, Castcllani, thought at first that the wee vil-lain back of the sleeping death was a streptococcus—likethe microbe that causes sore throats.

That was way off the truth, but Castcllani had the meritof working with his hands, trying this, trying that, devisingingenious ways of looking at the juices of those darkies.And so one day—by one of those unpredictable stumblesthat lie at the bottom of so many discoveries—Castellanihappened on one of those nasty little old friends of DavidBruce, a trypanosome. From inside the backbone of adeadly drowsy black man Castellani had got fluid—to lookfor streptococcus. He put that fluid into a centrifuge—thatworks like a cream separator—to try to whirl possible mi-crobes down to the bottom of the tube in the hope to findstreptoccus. Down the barrel of his microscope Castellanisquinted at a drop of the gray stuff from the bottom ofthe fluid and saw

A trypanosome, and this beast was very much the sametype of wiggler David Bruce had fished out of die bloodof horses dying of nagana. Castellan ^ept squinting, found

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more trypanosomes, in the spinal juices and even in theblood of a half a dozen doomed darkies. . . .

That was the beginning, for if Castellani had not seenthem, told Bruce about them, they might never have beenfound.

Meanwhile the smolder of the sleeping death broke intoa flare that threatened English power in Africa. And theRoyal Society sent the veteran David Bruce down there,with the trained searcher Nabarro, with Staff-Sergeant Gib-bons, who could do anything from building roads to fixinga microscope. Then of course Mrs. Bruce was along; shehad the title of Assistant—but Bruce paid her fare.

They came down to Uganda, met Castellani. He toldBruce about the streptococcus—and the trypanosomes. Backto the laboratory went these two; microscopes were un-packed, set up; doomed darkies carried in. Heavy needleswere jabbed into these sad people’s spines. Castellani, theyoung Nabarro, and Mrs. Bruce bent over their microscopesto find the yes or no of the discovery of Castellani. Therethey sat, in this small room on the Equator, squintingdown the barrels of their machines at a succession of graynothingnesses.

A bellow from Bruce: “I’ve got one!” The rest crowdround, squint in turn, exclaim as they watch the writhingtrypanosome poke his exploring whip about in the grayfield of the lens. Then they go back to their places—toshout discovery in their turn. So it went, from breakfasttill the swift dusk of evening. In every single sample ofspinal fluid from each one of his more than forty sleeping-sickness patients, Bruce and his companions found thosetrypanosomes.

“But they may be in healthy people’s spines too!” saidBruce. Bruce knew that if he found them in healthy Nc-

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grocs, all this excitement would be only, a wild-goose chase—he must prove they were to be found only in folks withsleeping sickness. But to get fluid out of healthy people'sspines? Folks dopey from the sleeping death didn’t mindit so much—but to jab one of those big needles into theback of healthy wide-awake colored people, who had nowish to be martyrs to science. . . . Can you blame them?It is no picnic having such a spear stuck into your spine.Then Bruce hit on a crafty scheme. He went to the hospi-tal, where there was a fine array of patients with all kindsof diseases—but no sleeping sickness—and then, flimflam-ming them into thinking the operation would do themgood, this liar in the holy cause of microbe hunting jabbedhis needles into the smalls of the backs of Negroes withbroken legs and with headaches, into youngsters who hadjust been circumcised, and into their brothers or sisters whowere suffering from yaws, or the itch; from all of them hegot spinal fluid.

And it was a great success. Not one of these folks—whohad no sleeping sickness—harbored a single trypanosome inthe fluid of their spines. Maybe the operation did do themsome good—but no matter, they had served their purpose.The trypanosome, Castellani and Bruce now knew, was thecause of sleeping sickness!

Now—and this is rare in the dreamers who find funda-mental facts in science—Bruce was a fiend for practical ap-plications, not poetically like Pasteur, for Bruce wasn’tgiven to such lofty soarings, nor was he practical in thedangerous manner of the strange genius I tell of in thelast chapter of this story; but the moment he turned to thestudy of a new plague, Bruce’s gray eyes would dartround, he would begin asking himself questions: What isthe natural home of the virus of this disease?—How does

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it get from sick to healthy?—What is its fountain and ori-gin?—Is there anything peculiar in the way this sleepingsickness has spread?

That was the way he went at it now. He had discoveredthe trypanosome that was the cause. There were a thou-sand pretty little researches to tempt the scholar in him,hut he brushed all these aside. Old crafty hand at seat th-ing that he was, he fished round in his memories, andcame to nagana, and screwed up his eyes: “Is there any-thing peculiar about the way sleeping sickness is located inthis country?” He pondered.

He sniffed around. With Mrs. Bruce he explored thelngh-treed shores of the lake, the islands, the rivers, the jun-gle. Then the common-sense eye which sees things a hun-dred searchers might stumble over and go by—showed himthe answer. It was strange—suspiciously strange—thatsleeping sickness was found only in a very narrow strip ofcountry—along the water, only along the water, on the is-lands, up the river—even by the Ripon Falls where Vic-toria Nyanza gives herself up to the making of the Nile,there were cases of it, but never inland. That must meansome insect, a blood-sucking insect, which lives only nearwater, must carry the disease. That was his guess, why, Icannot tell you. “Maybe it is a tsetse fly, a special one liv-ing only near lake shores and river banks!”

So Bruce went around asking everybody about tsetse fliesin Uganda. He inquired of local bug experts: no, theywere sure tsetse flies could not live at an altitude abovethree thousand feet. He asked the native headmen, eventhe black Prime Minister of Uganda: sorry, we have ablood-sucking fly, called Kivu—but there are no tsetse fliesin Uganda.

But there must be!

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VI

And there were. One day, as they walked through theBotanical Garden at Entebbe, Bruce pushing his bulkybody between the rows of tropic plants ahead of his smallwife—there was a glad shriek from her. . . . “Why, Da-vid! There arc two tsetse—on your back!” That womanwas a scientific Diana. She swooped on those two tsetses,and caught them, and gave them a practical pinch—justenough to kill them, and then showed them to her hus-band. They had been perched, ready to strike, within afew inches of his neck. Now they knew they were on thetrail.

Hard work began in the laboratory; already Bruce hadfound an excellent experimental animal—the monkey,which he could put into a beautiful fatal sleep, just likethat of a man, by injecting fluid from the spines ofdoomed Negroes. But now to catch tsetse flies. They armedthemselves with butterfly nets and the glass-windowedcages they had invented in Zululand. Then these insepara-ble searchers climbed into canoes; lusty crews of black boysshot them across the Like. Along the banks they walked—it was charming in the shade there—but listen! Yes, therewas the buzz of the tsetse. . . . They tried to avoid beingbitten. They were bit—and stayed awake nights wonderingwhat would happen—they went back to the laboratoryand clapped the cages on the backs of monkeys. It was agood time for them.

That is the secret of those fine discoveries Bruce made. Itwas because he was a hunter. Not only with his mind—but a bold everlastingly curious snouting hunter with hisbody too. If he had sat back and listened to those mission-aries, or stayed listening to those bug experts—he wouldnever have learned that Kivu was the Uganda name for

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the tsetse. He would never have found the tsetse. But hecarried the fight to the enemy—and as for Mrs. Bruce, thatwoman was better than a third hand or two extra pairs ofeyes for him.

Now they planned and did terrible experiments. Dayafter day they caused tsetse flies to feed on patients near todeath (already too deep in sleep to be annoyed by the in-sects); they interrupted the flies in the midst of their meal,and put the angry, half-satisfied cages of them on thebacks of monkeys. With all the tenderness of high-pricednurses watching over Park Avenue babies they saw to itthat only their experimental flies, and no chance flies fromoutside, got a meal off those beasts. Other searchers mighthave rolled their thumbs waiting to sec what happened tothe monkeys, but not Bruce.

He proceeded to call in a strange gang of co-workers tohelp him in one of the most amazing tests of all microbehunting. Bruce asked for an audience from the high-plumed gay-robed potentate, Apolo Kagwa, Prime Ministerof Uganda. He told Apolo he had discovered the microbeof the sleeping death which was killing so many thousandsof his people. He informed him many thousands more al-ready had the parasite in their blood, and were doomed,“But there is a way to stop the ruin that faces your coun-try, for I have reason to believe it is the tsetse fly—the in-sect you call Kivu—and only this insect, that carries thepoisonous germ from a sick man to a healthy one ”

The magnificent Apolo broke in: “But I cannot believethat is so—Kivu has been on the Lake shore always, andmy people have only begun to be taken by the sleepingsickness during the last few years ■'*

Bruce didn’t argue. He bluffed, as follows: “If you donot believe me, give me a chance to prove it to you. Godown, Apolo Kagwa, to the Crocodile Point on the Lake

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shore where Kivu swarms so. Sit on the shore there withyour feet in the water for five minutes. Don’t keep off theflies—and I’ll promise you’ll be a dead man in two years!”

The bluff was perfect: “What then, is to be done. Colo-nel Bruce?” asked Apolo.

“Well, I must be dead sure I am right,” Bruce told him.Then he showed Apolo a great map of Uganda. “If I'mright, where there is sleeping sickness—there we will findtsetse flies too. Where there are no tsetse—there should beno sleeping sickness.”

So Bruce gave Apolo butterfly nets, and killing bottles,and envelopes; he gave directions about the exact way toset down all the facts, and he told how Apolo’s darky min-ions might pinch the flies without getting stabbed them-selves. “And then we will put our findings down on thismap—and see if I’m right.”

Apolo was nothing if not intelligent, and efficient. Hesaid he would see what could be done. There were bowsand amiable formalities. In a jiffy the black Prime Ministerhad called for his head chief, the Sekibobo, and all theparaphernalia, with rigid directiuns, went from the Seki-bobo to the lesser headmen, and from them down to thecanoe men—the wheels of that perfect feudal system wereset going. . . .

Presently the envelopes began to pour in on Bruce andcalled him away from his monkey experiments. They clut-tered the laboratory, they called him from his peeringsinto the intestines of tsetse flies where he looked for tryp-anosomes. Rapidly, with perfectly recorded facts—most ofthem set down by intelligent blacks and some by mission-aries—the envelopes came in. It was a kind of scientificco-working you would have a hard time finding amongwhite folks, even white medical men. Each envelope had agrubby assorted mess of biting flies, they had a dirty time

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sorting them, but every time they found a tsetse, a red-headed pin went into that spot on the map—and if a re-port of “sleeping sickness present” came with that fly, ablack-headed pin joined it. From the impressive Sekibobodown to the lowest fly-boy, Apolo’s men had done theirwork with an automatic perfection. At last the red andblack dots on the map showed that where there were tset-ses, there was the sleeping death—and where there were notsetses—there was not a single case of sleeping sickness!

The job looked finished. The unhappy monkeys bit bythe flies who had sucked the blood of dying Negroes—thesemonkeys’ mouths fell open while they tried to eat their be-loved bananas; they went to sleep and died. Other mon-keys never bit by flics—but kept in the same cages, eatingout of the same dishes—those monkeys never showed a signof the disease. Here were experiments as clean, as pretty asthe best ones Theobald Smith had made. . . .

VII

But now for action! Whatever of the dreamer and lab-oratory experimenter there was in him—and there wasmuch—those creative parts of David Bruce went to sleep,or evaporated out of him; he became the surgeon of Lady-smith once more, and the rampageous shooter of lions andkiller of koodoos. . . . To wipe out the sleeping sickness!That seemed the most brilliantly simple job now. Not thatthere weren’t countless thousands of blacks with trypano-somes in their blood, and all these folks must die, ofcourse; not that there weren’t buzzing billions of tsetsessinging their hellish tune on the Lake shore—but here wasthe point: Those flies lived only on the La\e shore! Andif they had no more sleeping-sickness blood to suck, then.

. . . And Apolo Kagwa was absolute Tsar of all Uganda- . . Apolo, Bruce knew, trusted him, adored him. • . .

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Now to wipe sleeping sickness from the earth!

To conference with Bruce once more came Apolo andthe Sekibobo and the lesser chiefs. Bruce told them thesimple logic qf what was to be done.

“Of course—that can be done,” said Apolo. He had seenthe map. He was convinced. He made a dignified wave ofthe hand to his chiefs, and gave a few words of explana-tion. So Bruce and Mrs. Bruce went back to England.Apolo gave his order, and then the pitiful population ofblack men and their families streamed inland out of theLake shore villages, away—not to return for years, or ever—from those dear shady places where they and the long lineof their forefathers had fished and played and bargainedand begot their kind; canoes, loaded with mats andearthen pots and pickaninnies set out (not to return) fromthe thickly peopled island—and the weird outlandish beat-ing of the tom-toms no longer boomed across the water.

“Not one of you,” commanded Apolo, “may live withinfifteen miles of the Lake shore—not one of you is to visitthe Lake again. Then the sleeping death will die out, forthe fly Kivu lives only by the water, and when you aregone she will no longer have a single sick one from whomto suck the fatal poison. When all of our people who arenow sick have died, you may go back—and it will be safeto live by the Lake shore for always.”

Without a word—it is incredible to us law-abiding folks—they obeyed their potentate.

The country around Lake Victoria Nyanza grew, in thefrantic way tropical green things grow, back into the pri-mordial jungle; crocodiles snoozed on the banks where bigvillages had been. Hippopotami waddled onto the shoreand sniffed in the deserted huts. . . . The tribes of thelake, inland, were happy, for no more of them came down

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with that fatal drowsiness. So Bruce began to rid Africaof sleeping sickness.

It was a triumph—in a time of great victories in the fightof men against death. The secret of the spread of malaria—you will hear the not too savory story of it presently-had been found in India and Italy. And as for yellowfever—it seemed as if the yellow jack was to be put tosleep for good. Great Eminences of the medical professionpointed in speeches amid cheers to the deeds of medicine.. . . The British Empire rang with hosannahs for DavidBruce. He was promoted Colonel. He was dubbed KnightCommander of the Bath. Lady Bruce? Well, she wasproud of him and stayed his assistant, obscurely. AndBruce still paid, out of his miserable colonel’s salary, herfare on those expeditions they were always making.

Africa looked safe for the black men, and open to thebenevolent white men. But nature had other notions. Shehad cards up her sleeve. She almost never lets herself beconquered at a swoop, Napolconically—as Bruce and Apolo(and who can blame them?) thought they had done. Na-ture was not going to let her vast specimen cabinet berobbed so easily of every last one of those pretty parasites,the trypanosomes of sleeping sickness. A couple of yearspassed, and suddenly the Kavirondo people, on the eastshore of the Lake where sleeping death had never been—these folks began to go to sleep and not wake up. Andthere were disturbing reports of hunters coming down withsleeping sickness, even in those places that should have beensafe, in the country from which all human life had beenmoved away. The Royal Society sent out another Commis-sion (Bruce was busy with that affair of goat’s milk givingMalta fever) and one of these new commissioners was abright young microbe hunter, Tulloch. He went on a plc-

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nic one day to a nice part of the shore whose dark greenwas dotted with scarlet flowers. It must be safe there now,they thought, but a tsetse buzzed, and in less than a yearTulloch had drowsed into his last cold sleep. The Com-mission went home. . . .

Bruce—you would think he would be looking by thistime for some swivel-chair button-pressing job—packed hiskit-bag and went back to Uganda, to see what he had leftout of those experiments that had looked so sure. He hadgone off half-cocked, with that Napoleonic plan of movinga nation, but who can blame him? It had looked so sim-ple, and how expect even the craftiest of the cheaters ofNature to find out, in a year, every single nook where Na-ture hides the living poisons to kill the presumptuous menwho cheat her! Lady Bruce as usual went with him, andthey found new epidemics of sleeping sickness flaring up inunwonted places. It was a miserable discouraging business.

Bruce was a modest man, who had no foolish vanity totell him that his own theories were superior to brute facts.“My plan has been a washout,” you can hear him grum-bling. “Somewhere, aside from the human being, thosetsetses must get the trypanosomes—maybe it’s like the na-gana—maybe they can live in wild beasts’ blood too. . .

Now if Bruce had theories that were a little too simplehe was just the same an exceedingly crafty experimenter; ithe had a foolish faith in his experiments, he had the per-sistence to claw his way out of the bogs of disappointmentthat his simplicity and love of gorgeous deeds got him into.What a stubborn man he was! For, when you think of themenagerie of birds, beasts, fishes and reptiles Ugandais, you wonder why he didn’t pack his bags and start backfor England. But no. Once more the canoe man paddledBruce and his lady across to that tangled shore, and theycaught flies in places where for three years no man had

been. Strange experiments they made in a heat to embar-rass a salamander—one laborious complicated record in hisnotes tells of two thousand, eight hundred and seventy-sixflies (which could never have bitten a human sleeping-sick-ness patient) fed on five monkeys—and two of these mon-keys came down with the disease!

“The trypanosomes must be hiding in wild animals!”Bruce cries. So they go to the dangerous Crocodile Point,and catch wild pigs and African gray and purple herons;they bleed sacred ibises and glossy ones; they stab and getblood from plovers and kingfishers and cormorants—andeven crocodiles! Everywhere they look for those deadly,hiding, thousandth-of-an-inch-long wigglers.

They caught tsetse flics on Crocodile Point. See the fan-tastic picture of them there, gravely toiling at a job fit fora hundred searchers to take ten years at. Bruce sits withhis wife on the sand in the middle of a ring of bare-backed paddlers who squat round them. The tsetses buzzdown onto the paddlers* backs. The fly-boys pounce onthem, hand them to Bruce, who snips off their heads,waves the buzzing devils away from his own neck, deter-mines the sex of each fly caught, dissects out its intestine—and smears the blood in them on thin glass slides. . . .

Washouts, most of these experiments; but one day, inthe blood of a native cow from the Island of Kome, nothurting that cow at all, but ready to be sucked up by thetsetse for stabbing under the skin of the first man it meets,Bruce found the trypanosome of sleeping sickness. He sentout word, and presently a lot of bulls and cows weredriven up the hill to Mpumu by order of Apolo JCagwa.Bruce, himself in the thick of it, directed dusty fly-bitingsof these cattle—yes! there was no doubt the sleeping-sick-ness virus could live in them. Then there were scuffles inthe hot pens with fresh-caught antelope; they were thrown,

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they were tied, Bruce held dying monkeys across theirflanks, and let harmless tsetses, bred in the laboratory, feedon the monkey and then on the buck. . . .

“The fly country around the Lake shore will have to becleared of antelope, too, as well as men—before the Kivubecome harmless,” Bruce said at last to Apolo.

And now the sleeping death really disappeared from the■shores of Lake Victoria Nyanza.

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The ten thousand smaller microbe hunters who work atlesser jobs to-day, as well as the dozen towering oneswhose adventures this book tells, all of them have to takesome risk of death. But if the ten thousand smaller mi-crobe hunters of to-day could by some chemistry bechanged into death-fighters like Bruce! There was some-thing diabolical in the risks he took, and something yetmore devilish in the way he could laugh—with a dry hu-mor—and wish other microbe hunters might have died toprove some of his own theories. But he had a right towish death for others

“Can young tsetse flies, bred in the laboratory, inherit thesleeping-sickness trypanosome from their mothers? Surelythere was a chance of it (you remember that strange busi-ness of Theobald Smith’s mother-ticks bequeathing theTexas fever microbe to their children). But analogies arefor philosophers and lawyers. “Are artificially hatchedyoung tsetses dangerous?” asked Bruce. “No!” he can an-swer. “For two members of the commission” [modestly hedoes not say which two members] “allowed hundreds oftsetse flies, bred in the laboratory, to bite ihem. And theresult was negative.”

But no man knew what the result would be—before hetried. And the deaths from sleeping sickness (according to

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the best figures) are one hundred out of one hundred. . . .

How he enjoyed hearing of other men trying to killthemselves to find out! His last African foray was in 1911—he stayed until 1914. He was near sixty; his blacksmith’sstrength was beginning to crack from a nasty infection j£his air-tubes got from I know not what drenching rains orchills of high tropic nights. But a new form of sleepingsickness—terrible stuff that killed in a few months insteadof years—had just broken out in Nyassaland and Rhodesia.There was a great scientific quarrel on. Was the trypano-some causing this disease some new beast just out of thewomb of Nature—or was it nothing else than Bruce’s oldparasite of nagana, tired of butchering only cows, dogs andhorses, and now learning to kill men?

Bruce went to work at it. A German in Portuguese EastAfrica said: “This trypanosome is a new kind of bug!”Bruce retorted: “On the contrary, it is nothing but the na-gana germ hopping from cows to men.”

Then this German, his name was Tautc, took the bloodof an animal about to die from nagana, and shot five cubiccentimeters of it—it held millions of trypanosomes—underhis own skin: to prove the nagana parasite docs not killmen. And he let scores of tsetse flies bite him, flies whosebellies and spit-glands were crammed with the writhingmicrobes—he did these things to prove his point!

Was Bruce shocked at this? Listen to him, then: “It is amatter for some scientific regret that these experiments werenot successful—though we can ill spare our bold and some-what rash colleague—for then the question would havebeen answered. ... As it is, these negative experimentsprove nothing. It may be that only one man in a thousandwould become infected that way.”

Merciless Bruce! Poor Taute! He tried conscientiously tokill himself—and Bruce says it is too bad he did not die.

He made the ultimate gesture—surely the God of searcherswill reward him; then Bruce (and he is right) criticizesthe worth of Taute’s lone desperate experiment!

Nyassaland was the last battlefield of Bruce against thesleeping sickness, and it was his most hopeless one. Forhere he found that the Glossina morsitans (that is thename of the tsetse carrier of the sickness) does not make itshome only on the shores of lakes and rivers, but buzzesand bites from one end of Nyassaland to the other; thereis no way of running away from it, no chance of movingnations out from under it here. . . . Bruce stuck at it, hespent years at measurements of the lengths of trypano-somes—monotonous enough this work was to have drivena subway ticket chopper mad—he was trying to find outwhether the nagana and this new disease were one and thesame thing. He ended by not finding out, and he finishedwith this regret: that it was at present impossible to do theexperiment to clinch the matter one way or the other.

That experiment was the injection of the nagana tryp-anosomes, not into one, or a hundred—but a thousand hu-man beings.

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But there was grisly hope left in the old Viking. “Atpresent it is impossible,” he said, while he believed thatsomewhere, somewhen, men may be found, in the mass,who will be glad to die for truth. And as you will see, ina story of a band of American buck-privates in anotherchapter, there are beginnings of such spirit even now. Butwhen great armies of men so offer themselves, to fightdeath, just as they now delight to fight each other, it willbe because they are led on by captains such as DavidBruce.

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CHAPTER X

ROSS VS. GRASSIMalaria

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The last ten years of the nineteenth century were as un-fortunate for ticks, bugs, and gnats as they were gloriousfor the microbe hunters. Theobald Smith had started themoff by scotching the ticks that carried Texas fever; a littlelater and six thousand miles away David Bruce, stumblingthrough the African bush, got onto the trail of the tsetsefly, accused him, convicted him. How melancholy and leanhave been the years, since then, for that murderous tickwhose proper name is Bo-ophilus bovis, and you may besure that since those searchings of David Bruce, the tsetseshave had to bootleg for the blood of black natives andwhite hunters, and missionaries. And now alas for mosqui-toes! Malaria must be wiped from the earth. Malaria canbe destroyed! Because, by the middle of 1899, two wran-gling and not too dignified microbe hunters had provedthat the mosquito—and only one particular kind of mos-quito—was the criminal in the malaria mystery.

Two men solved that puzzle. The one, Ronald Ross,was a not particularly distinguished officer in the medicalservice of India. The other, Battista Grassi, was a very dis-tinguished Italian authority on worms, white ants, and thedoings of eels. You cannot put one before the other in theorder of their merit—Ross would certainly have stoppedshort of solving the puzzle without Grassi. And Grassimight (though I am not so sure of that!) have muddled

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for years if the searchings of Ross had not given him hints.So there is no doubt they helped each other, but unhappilyfor the Dignity of Science, before the huzzahs of the res-cued populations had died away, Battista Grassi and Ron-ald Ross were in each other’s hair on the question of whodid how much. It was deplorable. To listen to these two,you would think each would rather this noble discoveryhad remained buried, than have the other get a mite ofcredit for it. Indeed, the only consolation to be got fromthis scientific brawl—aside from the saving of human lives—is the knowledge that microbe hunters are men like therest of us, and not stuffed shirts or sacred cows, as certainhistorians would have us believe. They sat there, BattistaGrassi and Ronald Ross, indignant co-workers in a gloriousjob, in the midst of their triumph, with figurative torncollars and metaphorical scratched faces. Like two quar-relsome small boys they sat there.

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For the first thirty-five years of his life Ronald Ross triedhis best not to be a microbe hunter. He was born in thefoothills of the Himalayas in India, and knowing his fa-ther (if you believe in eugenics) you might suspect thatRonald Ross would do topsy-turvy things with his life.Father Ross was a ferocious looking border-fighting Englishgeneral with belligerent side-whiskers, who was fond ofbattles but preferred to paint landscapes. He shipped hisson Ronald Ross back to England before he was ten, andpresently, before he was twenty, Ronald was making a nottoo enthusiastic pass at studying medicine, failing to passhis examinations because he preferred composing music tothe learning of Latin words and the cultivation of the bed-lide manner. This was in the eighteen-seventies, mind you,■» the midst of the most spectacular antics of Pasteur, but

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from the autobiography of Ronald Ross, which is a strangemixture of cleverness and contradiction, of frank abuse ofhimself and of high enthusiasm for himself, you can onlyconclude that this revolution in medicine left Ronald Rosscold.

But he was, for all that, something of a chaser of moon-beams, because, finding that his symphonies didn’t turn outto be anything like those of Mozart, he tried literature, inthe grand manner. He neglected to write prescriptionswhile he nursed his natural bent for epic drama. But pub-lishers didn’t care for these masterpieces, and when Rossprinted them at his own expense, the public failed to getexcited about them. Father Ross became indignant at thisdabbling and threatened to stop his allowance, so Ronald(he had spunk) got a job as a ship’s doctor on the AnchorLine between London and New York. On this vessel heobserved the emotions and frailties of human nature in thesteerage, wrote poetry on the futility of life, and got up hisback medical work. Finally he passed the examination forthe Indian Medical Service, found the heat of India detest-able, but was glad there was little medical practice to at-tend to, because it left him time to compose now totallyforgotten epics and sagas and blood-and-thunder romancesThat was the beginning of the career of Ronald Ross!

Not that there was no chance for him to hunt microbesin India. Microbes? The very air was thick with them.The water was a soup of them. All around him in Madraswere the stinking tanks breeding the Asiatic cholera; hesaw men die in thousands of the black plague; he heardtheir teeth rattle with the ague of malaria, but he had noears or eyes or nose for all that—for now he forgot litera-ture to become a mathematician. He shut himself up in-venting complicated equations. He devised systems of the.universe of a grandeur he thought equal to Newton’s. He

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forgot about these to write another novel. He took twenty-five-mi!c-a-day walking trips in spite of the heat and thencursed India bitterly because it was so hot. He was or-dered o/T to Burma and to the Island of Moulmein, andhere he did remarkable surgical operations—‘‘which curedmost of the cases”—though he had never presumed to be asurgeon. He tried everything but impressed hardly any-body; years passed, and, when the Indian Medical Servicefailed to recognize his various abilities, Ronald Ross cried:“Why work?”

He went back to England on his first furlough in 1888,and there something happened to him, an event that isoften an antidote to cynicism and a regulator of confusedmultitudinous ambitions. He met, he was smitten with,and presently he married Miss Rosa Bloxam. Back in India—though he wrote another novel called “Child of Ocean”and invented systems of shorthand and devised phoneticspellings for the writing of verse and was elected secretaryof the Golf Club—he began to fumble at his proper work.In short he began to turn a microscope, with which hewas no expert, on to the blood of malarious Hindus. Thebizarre, many-formed malaria microbe had been discoveredlong ago in 1880 by a French army surgeon, Lavcran, andRonald Ross, who was as original as he was energetic andnever did anything the way anybody else did it, tried tofind this malaria germ by methods of his own.

Of course, he failed again. He bribed, begged, and whee-dled drops of blood out of the fingers of hundreds ofaguey East Indians. He peered. He found nothing. “La-veran is certainly wrong! There is no germ of malaria!”said Ronald Ross, and he wrote four papers tryirig toprove that malaria was due to intestinal disturbances. Thatwas his start in microbe hunting!

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II

He went back to London in 1894, plotting to throw upmedicine and science. He was thirty-six. “Everything I hadtried had failed,” lie wrote, but he consoled himself by im-agining himself a sad defiant lone wolf: “But my failuredid not depress me ... it drove me aloft to peaks of soli-tude. . . . Such a spirit was a selfish spirit but neverthelessa high one. It desired nothing, it sought no praise ... ithad no friends, no fears, no loves, no hates.”

But as you will see, Ronald Ross knew nothing of him-self, for when he got going at his proper work, there wasnever a less calm and more desirous spirit than his. Nor amore enthusiastic one. And how he could hate!

When Ross returned to London he met Patrick Manson,an eminent and mildly famous English doctor. Mansonhad got himself medically notorious by discovering thatmosquitoes can suck worms out of the blood of Chinamen(he had practiced in Shanghai); Manson had proved—thisis remarkable!—that these worms can even develop in thestomachs of mosquitoes. Manson was obsessed by mosqui-toes, he believed they were among the peculiar creatures ofGod, he was convinced they were important to the desti-nies of man, he was laughed at, and the medical wiseacresof Harley Street called him a “pathological Jules Verne.”He was sneered at. And then he met Ronald Ross—whomthe world had sneered at. What a pair of men these twowere! Manson knew so little about mosquitoes that he be-lieved they could suck blood only once in their lives, andRoss talked vaguely about mosquitoes and gnats not know-ing that mosquitoes were gnats. And yet

Manson took Ross in his office, and there he set Rossright about the malaria microbe of Laveran that Ross did

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not believe in. He showed Ronald Ross the pale malariaparasites, peppered with a blackish pigment. Togetherthey watched these germs, fished out of the blood of sail-ors just back from the equator, turn into little squads ofspheres inside the red blood cells, then burst out the bloodcells. “That happens just when the man has his chill,” ex-plained Manson. Ross was amazed at the mysterious trans-formations and cavortings of the malaria germs in theblood. After those spheres had galloped out of the cor-puscles, they turned suddenly into crescent shapes, thenthose crescents would shoot out two, three, four, sometimessix long whips, which lashed and curled about and madethe beast look like a microscopic octopus.

“That, Ross, is the parasite of malaria—you never find itin people without malaria—but the thing that bothers meis: How does it get from one man to another?”

Of course that didn’t really bother Patrick Manson at all.Every cell in that man’s brain had in it a picture of a mos-quito or the memory of a mosquito or a speculation abouta mosquito. He was a mild man, not a terrific workerhimself, but intensely prejudiced on this subject of mosqui-toes. And he appreciated Ronald Ross’s energy of a dy-namo, he knew Ronald Ross adored him, and he remem-bered Ross was presently returning to India. So one day, asthey walked along Oxford Street, Patrick Manson took hisjump: “Do you know, Ross,” he said, “I have formed thetheory that mosquitoes carry malaria . . . .” Ronald Rossdid not sneer or laugh.

Then the old doctor from Shanghai poured his fantastictheory over this young man whom he wanted to make hishands: “The mosquitoes suck the blood of people sick withmalaria . . . the blood has those crescents in it . . . theyget into the mosquito’s stomach and shoot out those whips. . . the whips shake themselves free and get into the mos-

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quito’s carcass. . . . The whips turn into some tough formlike the spore of an anthrax bacillus. . . . The mosquitoesdie . . . they fall into water . . . people drink a soup oldead mosquitoes. . . .”

This, mind you, was a story, a romance, a purelytrumped-up guess on the part of Patrick Munson. Put itwas a passionate guess, and by this time you have learned,maybe, that one guess, guessed enthusiastically enough- -oneguess in a billion may lead to something in this strangegame of microbe hunting. So this pair walked down Ox-ford Street. And Ross? Well, he talked about gnats andmosquitoes and did not know that mosquitoes were gnats.But Ross listened to Manson. . . . Mosquitoes carry ma-laria? That was an ancient superstition—but here wasDoctor Manson, thinking about nothing else. Mosquitoescarry malaria? Well, Ross’s books had not sold; his math-ematics were ignored. . . . But here was a chance, a gam-ble! If Ronald Ross could prove mosquitoes were to blamefor malaria! Why, a third of all the people in the hospi-tals in India were in bed with malaria. More than a mil-lion a year died, directly or indirectly, because of malaria,in India alone! But if mosquitoes were really to blame—it would be easy!—malaria could be absolutely wiped out.

. . . And if he, Ronald Ross, were the man to prove that!

“It is my duty to solve the problem,” Ross said. Fiction-eer thac he was, lie called it: “The Great Problem.” Andhe threw himself at Manson’s feet. “I am only your hands—it is your problem!” he assured the doctor from China.

“Before you go, you should find out something aboutmosquitoes,” advised Manson, who himself didn’t knowwhether there were ten different kinds of mosquitoes, orten thousand, who thought mosquitoes could live onlythree days after they had bitten. So Ross (who didn’tknow mosquitoes were gnats) looked all over London for

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books about mosquitoes—and couldn’t find any. Too littleof a scholar, then, to think of looking in the library of theBritish Museum, Ross was sublimely ignorant, but maybethat was best, for he had nothing to unlearn. Never hassuch a green searcher started on such a complicatedquest. . . .

He left his wife and children in England, and on thetwenty-eighth of March, 1H95, he set sail for India, withPatrick Manson’s blessing, and full of his advice. Mansonhad outlined experiments—but how did one go about do-ing an experiment? But mosquitoes carry malaria! Onwith the mosquito hunt! On the ship Ross pestered thepassengers, begging them to let him prick their fingers fora drop of blood. . . . He looked for mosquitoes, but theywere not among the discomforts of the ship, so he dissectedcockroaches—and he made an exciting discovery of a newkind of microbe in an unfortunate flying fish that hadflopped on the deck. He was ordered to Secunderabad, adesolate military station that sat between hot little lakes ina huge plain dotted with horrid heaps of rocks, and herebegan to work with mosquitoes. He had to take care ofpatients too, he was only a doctor and the Indian Govern-ment—who can blame them?—would not for a momentrecognize Ronald Ross as an official authentic microbehunter or mosquito expert. He was alone. Everybody wasagainst him from his colonel who thought him an insaneupstart to the black-skinned boys who feared him for adangerous nuisance (he was always wanting to prick theirfingers!). The other doctors! They did not even believe inthe malaria parasite. When they challenged him to showthem the germs in the patient’s blood, Ross went to thefray full of confidence, dragging after him a miserableHindu whose blood was rotten v'ith malaria microbes, butwhen the fatal test was made—curse it!—that wretched

Hindu suddenly felt fit as a fiddle. His microbes had de-parted from him. The doctors roared with laughter. ButRonald Ross kept at it.

He started out to follow Man son's orders. He capturedmosquitoes, any kind of mosquito, he couldn’t for the lifeof him have told you what kind they were. He let thepests loose under nets over beds on which lay naked andfoolishly superstitious dark-skinned people of a caste so lowthat they had no proper right to have emotions. The bloodof these people was charmingly full of malaria microbes.The mosquitoes hummed under the nets—and wouldn’tbite. Curse it! They could not be made to bite! “Theyare stubborn as mules,” wrote Ross, in agony, to PatrickManson. But he kept at it. Pic cajoled the mosquitoes. Hepestered the patients. Pie put them in the hot sun “tobring their flavor out.” The mosquitoes kept on hummingand remained sniflish. But, eureka! At last he hit on theidea of pouring water over the nets, soaking the nets—also the patients, but that was no matter—and finally themosquitoes got to work and sucked their fill of Hindublood. Ronald Ross caught them then, put them gingerlyin bottles, then day after day killed them and peeped intotheir stomachs to see if those malaria microbes they hadsucked in with the blood might be growing. They didn’tgrow!

He bungled. He was like any tyro searcher—only hisinnate hastiness made him worse—and he was constantlymaking momentous discoveries that turned out not to be,discoveries at all. But his bunglings had fire in them. Toread his letters to Patrick Manson, you would think hehad made himself miraculously small and crawled underthe lens into that blood among the objects he was learningto spy upon. And what was best, everything was a storyto him, no, more than a story, a melodrama. Manson had

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told him to watch those strange whips that grew out ofthe crescent malaria germs and made them look like oc-topuses. In vast excitement he wrote a long letter to Man-son, telling of a strange fight between a whip that hadshaken itself free, and a white blood cell—a phagocyte. Hewas a vivid man, was Ronald Ross. “He [Ross called thatwhip “he] kept poking the phagocyte in the ribs (!) indifferent parts of his body, until the phagocyte finally turnedand ran off howling . . . the fight between the whip andthe phagocyte was wonderful. ... I shall write a novel onit in the style of the ‘Three Musketeers.’ ” That was theway he kept himself at it and got himself past the firstambushes and disappointments of his ignorance and inex-perience. He collected malarious Hindus as a terrier collectsrats. He loved them if they were shot full of malaria, hedetested them when they got better. He gloried in thewretched Abdul Wahab, a dreadful case. He pounced onAbdul and dragged him from pillar to post. He put fleason him. He tortured him with mosquitoes. He failed.He kept at it. He wrote to Manson: “Please send me ad-vice. . . .” He missed important truths that lay right underhis nose—that yelled to be discovered.

But he was beginning to know just exactly what amalaria parasite looked like—he could spot its weird blackgrains of pigment, and tell them apart from all of the un-known tiny blobs and bubbles and balloons that driftedbefore his eyes under his lens. And the insides of thestomachs of mosquitoes? They were becoming as familiaras the insides of his nasty hot quarters!

What an incredible pair of searchers they were! Awayin London Patrick Manson kept answering Ross’s tangledtortured letters, felt his way and gathered hope from hismixed-up accounts of unimportant experiments. “Letmosquitoes bite people sick with malaria,” wrote Manson,

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‘then put those mosquitoes in a bottle of water and letthem lay eggs and hatch out grubs. Then give thatmosquito-water to people to drink. . . .”

So Ross fed some of this malaria-mosquito soup to Lutch-man, his servant, and almost danced with excitement asthe man’s temperature went up—but it was a false alarm,it wasn’t malaria, worse luck. ... So dragged the drearydays, the months, the years, feeding people mashed-upmosquitoes and writing to Man son: “I have a sort of feel-ing it will succeed—I feel a kind of religious excitementover it!” But it never succeeded. But he kept at it. Heintrigued to get to places where he might find more malar-ia; he discovered strange new mosquitoes and from theirbellies he dredged up unheard-of parasites—that had nothingto do with malaria. He tried everything. He was illogical.He was anti-scientific. He was like Edison combing theworld to get proper stuff out of which to make phonographneedles. “There is only one method of solution,” he wrote,“that is, by incessant trial and exclusion.” He wrote that,while the simple method lay right under his hand, unfelt.

lie wrote shrieking poems called “Wraths.” He was or-dered to Bangalore to try to stop the cholera epidemic, anddidn’t stop it. He became passionate about the Indianauthorities. “I wish I might rub their noses in the filth anddisease which they so impotently let fester in Hindustan,”Ronald Ross cried. But who can blame him? It was hotI here. “I was now forty years old,” he wrote, “but, thoughl was well known in India, both for my sanitary work atBangalore and for my researches on malaria I received noadvancement at all for my pains.”

So passed two years, until, in June of 1897 Ronald Rosscame back to Secunderabad, to the steamy hospital of

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Begumpett. The monsoon bringing its cool rain shouldhave already broken, but it had not. A hellish wind blewgritty clouds of dust into the laboratory of Ronald Ross.He wanted to throw his microscope out of the window.Its one remaining eyepiece was cracked, and its metal workwas rusted with his sweat. There was the punka, the blessedpunka, but he could not start the punka going because itblew his dead mosquitoes away, and in the evening whenthe choking wind had died, the dust still hid the sun in adreadful haze. Ronald Ross wrote:

What ails the solitude?

Is this the judgment day?

The sky is red as bloodThe very rocks decay.

And that relieved him and released him, just as anotherman might escape by whiskey or by playing bottle-pool,and on the sixteenth of August he decided to begin hiswork all over, to start, in short, where he had begun in1895—“only much more thoroughly this time.” So hestripped his malaria patient—it was the famous HuseinKhan. Under the mosquito net went Husein, for RonaldRoss had found a new kind of mosquito with which toplague this Husein Khan, and in his unscientific classifi-cation Ross called this mosquito, simply, a brown mosqui-to. (For the purposes of historical accuracy, and to be fairto Battista Grassi, I must state that it is not clear wherethese brown mosquitoes came from. In the early part ofhis report Ronald Ross says he raised them from the grubs—but a moment later, speaking of a closely related mos-quito, he says: “I have failed in finding their grubs also.”)

It is no wonder—though lamentable for the purposes ofhistory—that Ronald Ross was mixed up, considering hislone-wolf work and that hot wind and his perpetual fail-ures! Anyway, he took those brown mosquitoes (which

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may have bitten other beasts, who knows) and loosed themout of their bottles under the net. They sucked the bloodof Husein Khan, at a few cents per suck per mosquito,and then once more, one day after another, Ross peepedat the stomachs of those insects.

On the nineteenth of August lie had only three of thebrown beasts left. He cut one of them up. Hopelessly hebegan to look at the walls of its stomach, with its pretty,regular cells arranged like stones in a paved road.Mechanically he peered down the tube of his microscope,when suddenly something queer forced itself up into thefront of his attention.

What was this? In the midst of the even pavement ofthe cells of the stomach wall lay a funny circular thing,about a twenty-five-hundredth of an inch its diameter was—here was another! But, curse it! It was hot—he stoppedlooking. . . .

The next day it was the same. Here, in the wall of thestomach of the next to the last mosquito, four days afterit had sucked the blood of the unhappy malarious HuseinKhan, here were those same circular outlines—clear—muchmore distinct than the outlines of the cells of the stomach,and in each one of these circles was “a cluster of smallgranules, black as jet!” Here was another of those fantasticthings, and another—he counted twelve in all. He yawned.It was hot. That black pigment looked a lot like the blackpigment inside of malaria microbes in the blood of humanbodies—but it was hot. Ross yawned, and went home fora nap.

And as he awoke—so he says in his memoirs—a thoughtstruck him: “Those circles in the wall of the stomach ofthe mosquito—those circles with their dots of black pig-ment, they can’t be anything else than the malaria parasite,growing there. . . . That black pigment is just like the

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specks of black pigment in the microbes in the blood ofHusein Khan. . . . The longer I wait to kill my mosquitoesafter they have sucked his blood, the bigger those circlesshould grow ... if they are alive, they must growl”

Ross fidgeted about—and how he could fidget!—waitingfor the next day, that would be the fifth clay after his littleflock of mosquitoes had fed on Husein under the net. Thatwas the day for the cutting up of the last mosquito of theflock. Came the twenty-first of August. “I killed my lastmosquito,” Ronald Ross wrote to Manson, “and rushed athis stomach!”

Yes! Here they were again, those circle cells, one . . .two . . . six . . . twenty of them. . . . They were full ofthe same jet-black dots. . . . Sure enough! They werebigger than the circles in the mosquito of the day before.. . . They were really growing! They must be the malariaparasites growing! (Though there was no absolutely nec-essary reason they must be.) But they must be! Thosecircles with their black dots in the bellies of three measlymosquitoes now kicked Ronald Ross up to heights of ex-ultation. He must write verses!

“I have found thy secret deedsOh, million-murdering death.

I know that this little thingA million men will save—

Oh, death, where is thy sting?

Thy victory, oh, grave?’*

At least that is what Ronald Ross, in those memoirs ofhis, says he wrote on the night of the day of his first littlesuccess. But to Manson, telling the finest details about thecircles with their jet-black dots, he said only:

“The hunt is up again. It may be a false scent, but itsmells promising.”

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And in a scientific paper, sent off to England to theBritish Medical Journal, Ronald Ross wrote gravely like anycool searcher. He wrote admitting he had not taken painsto study his brown mosquitoes carefully. He admitted thejet-black dots might not be malaria parasites at all, butonly pigment coming from the blood in the mosquito’sgullet. There certainly was need for this caution, for hewas not sure where his brown mosquitoes came from: someof them might have sneaked in through a hole in the net—and those intruders might have bitten a bird or beastbefore they fed on his Hindu patient. It was a most mixed-up business. But he could write poems about saving thelives of a million men!

Such a man was Ronald Ross, mad poet shaking his fistin the face of the malignant Indian sun, celebrating un-certain discoveries with triumphant verses, spreading netswith maybe no holes in them. . . . But you must give himthis: he had been lifted up. And, as you will sec, it wasto the everlasting honor of Ronald Ross that he was ex-alted by this seemingly so piffling experiment. He clawedhis way—and this is one of the major humors of humanlife!—with unskilled but enthusiastic fingers toward theuncovering of a murderous fact and a complicated fact. Afact you would swear it would take the sure intelligenceof some god to uncover.

Then came one of those deplorable interludes. The HighAuthorities of the Indian Medical Service failed to appre-ciate him. They sent him off to active duty at doctoring,mere doctoring. Ronald Ross rained telegrams on his Prin-cipal Medical Officer. He implored Manson way off therein England. In vain. The) packed him off up north, wherethere were few mosquitoes, vhere the few he did catchwould not bite—it was so cold, where the natives (theywere Bhils) were so superstitious and savage they would

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not let him prick their fingers. All he could do was fishtrout and treat cases of itch. How he raved!

But Patrick Manson did not fail him, and presently Rosscame down from the north, to Calcutta, to a good labora-tory, to assistants, to mosquitoes, to as many—for that citywas a fine malaria pest-hole!—Hindus with malaria crescentsin their blood as any searcher could possibly want. Headvertised for helpers. An assorted lot of dark-skinned mencame, and of these he chose two. The first, Mahomed Bux,Ronald Ross hired because he had the appearance of ascoundrel, and (said Ross) scoundrels arc much more likelyto be intelligent. The second assistant Ross chose was Pur-boona. All we know of that man is that he had the boom-ing name of Purboona, and Purboona lost his chance tobecome immortal because he vamoosed after his first payday.

So Ross and Mr. Mahomed Bux set to work to try tofind once more the black-dotted circles in the stomachs ofmosquitoes. Mr. Mahomed Bux sleuth-footed it about,among the sewers, the drains, the stinking tanks of Cal-cutta, catching gray mosquitoes and brindled mosquitoesand brown and green dappled-winged ones. They tried allkinds of mosquitoes (within the limits of Ronald Ross’sfeeble knowledge of the existing kinds). And Mr. MahomedBux? He was a howling success. The mosquitoes seemedto like him, they would bite Hindus for this wizard of aMahomed when Ross could not make them bite at all—Mahomed whispered things to his mosquitoes. . . . And arascal? No. Mr. Mahomed Bux had just one little weak-ness—he faithfully got thoroughly drunk once a week onGanja. But the experiments? They turned out as miser-ably as Mahomed turned out beautifully, and it was easy

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for Ross to wonder whether the heat was causing him tosee things last year at Begumpett.

Then the God of Gropers came to help Ronald Ross.Birds have malaria. The malaria microbe of birds looksvery like the malaria microbe of men. Why not try birds?

So Mr. Mahomed Bux went forth once more and cun-ningly snared live sparrows and larks and crows. Theyput them in cages, on beds, with mosquito bar over thecages, and Mahomed slept, with one eye open, on thefloor between the beds to keep away the cats.

On St. Patrick’s day of the year iSgS, Ronald Ross letloose ten giay mosquitoes into a cage containing threelarks, and the blood of those larks teemed with the germsof malaria. The ten mosquitoes bit those larks, and filledthemselves with lark’s blood.

Three days later Ronald Ross could shout: “The microbeof the malaria of birds grows in the wall of the stomachof the gray mosquito—just as the human microbe grew inthe wall of the stomach of the brown spot-winged mosqui-to.”

Then he wrote to Patrick Manson. This lunatic Rossbecame for a moment himself a malaria microbe! Thatnight he wrote these strange words to Patrick Manson:

“I find that I exist constantly in three out of four mos-quitoes fed on bird-malaria parasites, and that I increaseregularly in size from about a seven-thousandth of an inchafter about thirty hours to about one seven-hundredth of aninch after about eighty-five hours. ... I find myselfin large numbers in about one out of two mosquitoes fedon two crows with blood parasites. . . .”

He thought he was himself a circle with those jet-blackdots. . . .

“What an ass I have been not to follow your advice be-fore and work with birds!” Ross wrote to Manson. Heaven

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knows what Ronald Ross would have discovered withoutthat persistent Patrick Manson.

You would think that such a man as Ross, wild as themaddest of hatters, topsy-turvy as the dream of a hasheesh-eater, you would swear, I say, that he could do no accurateexperiments. Wrong! For presently he was up to his earsin an experiment Pasteur would have been proud to do.

Mr. Mahomed Bux brought in three sparrows, and oneof these sparrows was perfectly healthy, with no malariamicrobes in its blood; the second had a few; but the thirdsparrow was very sick—his blood swarmed with the black-dotted germs. Ross took these three birds and put eachone in a separate cage, mosquito-proof. Then the artfulMahomed took a brood of she-mosquitoes, clean, raised fromthe grubs, free of all suspicion of malaria. He divided thisflock up into three little flocks, he whispered Hindustaniwords of encouragement to them. Into each cage, with itssparrow, he let loose a flock of these mosquitoes.

Marvelous! Not a mosquito who sucked the blood of thehealthy sparrow showed those dotted circles in her stomach.The insects who had bitten the mildly sick bird had a few.And Ronald Ross, peeping through his lens at the stomachsof the mosquitoes who had bitten the very sick sparrow-found their gullets fairly polka-dotted with the jet-blackpigmented circles!

Day after day Ross killed and cut up one after anotherof the last set of mosquitoes. Day after day, he watchedthose circles swelling, growing—there was no doubt aboutit now; they began to look like warts sticking out of thewall of the stomach. And he watched weird things hap-pening in those warts. Little bright colored grains multi-plied in them, “like bullets in a bag/* Were these youngmalaria microbes? Then where did they go from here?

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How did they get into new healthy birds? Did they,indeed, get from mosquitoes into other birds?

Excitedly Ronald Ross wrote to Patrick Manson: “Well,the theory is proved, the mosquito theory is a fact.” Whichof course it wasn’t, but that was the way Ronald Ross en-couraged himself. There was another regrettable interlude,in which the unseen hand of his incurable restless dissatis-faction took him by the throat, and dragged him away upnorth to Darjeeling, to the hills that make giant’s steps upto the white Himalayas, but of this interlude we shall notspeak, for it was lamentable, this restlessness of RonaldRoss, with the final simple experiment fairly yelling to bedone. . . .

But by the beginning of June he was back at his birdsin Calcutta—it was more than ioo degrees in his labora*mry—and he was asking: “Where do the malaria microbesgo from the circles that grow into those big warts in thestomach wall of the mosquito?”

They went, those microbes, to the spit-gland of thosemosquitoes!

Squinting through his lens at a wart on the wall of thestomach of a she-mosquito, seven days after she had madea meal from the blood of a malarious bird, Ronald Rosssaw that wart burst open! He saw a great regiment ofweird spindle-shaped threads march out of that wart. Hewatched them swarm through the whole body of that she-mosquito. He pawed around in countless she-mosquitocswho had fed on malarious birds. He watched other circlesgrow into warts, get ripe, burst, shoot out those spindles.He pried through his lens at the “million things that go tomake up a mosquito”—he hadn’t the faintest notion whatto call most of them—until one day, strangest of acts ofmalignant nature, he saw those regiments of spindle-threads,

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which had teemed in the body of the mosquito, marchto her spit-inland.

In that spit-gland, feebly, lazily moving in it, but swarm-ing in such myriads that they made it quiver, almost, underhis lens, were those regiments and armies of spindle-shapedthreads, hopeful valiant young microbes of malaria, readyto march up the tube to the mosquito’s stinger. . . .

“It’s by the bite mosquitoes carry malaria then,” Rosswhispered—he whispered it because that was contrary tothe theory of his scientific father, Patrick Manson. “It isall nonsense that birds—or people either—get malaria bydrinking dead mosquitoes, or by inhaling the dust of mos-quitoes. . . .” Ronald Ross had always been loyal to PatrickManson. But now! Never has there been a finer instanceof wrong theories leading a microbe hunter to unsuspectedfacts. But now! Ronald Ross needed no help. He was asearcher.

“It’s by the bite!” shouted Ronald Ross, so, on the twenty-fifth d^iy of June in 1898, Mr. Mahomed Bux brought inthree perfectly healthy sparrows—fine sparrows with not asingle microbe of malaria in their blood. That night, andnight after night after that night, with Ronald Ross watch-ing, Mr. Mahomed Bux let into the cage with those healthysparrows a flock of poisonous shc-mosquitoes who had fedon sick birds. . . . And Ronald Ross, fidgety as a fatherwaiting news of his first-born child, biting his mustache,sweating, and sweating more yet because he used up somuch of himself cursing at his sweat—Ross watched thosemessengers of death bite the healthy sparrows. . . .

On the ninth of July Ross wrote to Patrick Manson:“All three birds, perfectly healthy before, are now simplyswarming with proteosoma.” (Proteosoma are the malar-ial parasites of birds.)

Now Ronald Ross did anything but live remotely on his

mountain top. He wrote this to Manson, he wired it toManson, he wrote it to Paris to old Alphonse Laveran, thediscoverer of the malaria microbe; he sent papers to onescientific journal and two medical journals about it; hetold everybody in Calcutta about it; he bragged about it—in short, this Ronald Ross was like a boy who had justmade his first kite finding that the kite could really fly.He went wild—and then (it is too bad!) he collapsed.Patrick Manson went to Edinburgh and told the doctorsof the great medical congress about the miracle of the so-journ and the growing and the meanderings of the malariamicrobes in the bodies of gray she-mosquitoes: he describedhow his protege, Ronald Ross, alone, obscure, laughed athut tenacious, had tracked the germ of malaria from theblood of a bird through the belly and body of she-mos-quitoes to their dangerous position in her stinger, ready tcbe shot into the next bird she bit.

The learned doctors gaped. Then Patrick Manson readout a telegram from Ronald Ross. It was the final proof:the bite of a malarial mosquito had given a healthy birdmalaria! The congress—this is the custom of congresses—permitted itself a dignified furor, and passed a resolutioncongratulating this unknown Major Ronald Ross on his“Great and Epoch-Making Discovery.” The congress—itis the habit of congresses—believed that what is true forbirds goes for men too. The congress—men in the massare ever uncritical—thought that this meant malaria wouldbe wiped out from to-morrow on and forever—for what issimpler than to kill mosquitoes? So that congress per-mitted itself a furor.

But Patrick Manson was not so sure: “One can objectthat the facts determined for birds do not hold, necessarily,for men.” He was right. There was the rub. This waswhat Ronald Ross seemed to forget: that nature is ever-

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lastingly full of surprises and annoying exceptions, and ifthere are laws and rules for the movements of the planets,there may be absolutely no apparent rime and less reasonfor the meanderings of the microbes of malaria. . . .Searchers, the best of them, still do no more than scratchthe surface of the most amazing mysteries, all they can do(yet!) to find truth about microbes is to hunt, hunt end-lessly. . . . There are no laws!

So Patrick Manson was stern with Ronald Ross. Thisnervous man, feeling he could stand this cursed India notone moment longer, must stand it months longer, yearslonger! He had made a brilliant beginning, but only abeginning. He must keep on, if not for science, or forhimself, then for England! For England! And in OctoberManson wrote him: “I hear Koch has failed with themosquito in Italy, so you have time to grab the discoveryfor England.”

But Ronald Ross—alas—could not grab that discoveryof human malaria, not for science, nor humanity, nor forEngland—nor (what was worst) for himself. He had cometo the end of his rope. And among all microbe hunters,there is for me no more tortured man than this same Ron-ald Ross. There have been searchers who have failed—theyhave kept on hunting with the naturalness of ducks swim-ming; there have been searchers who have succeededgloriously—but they were hunters born, and they kept onhunting in spite of the seductions of glory. But Ross!Here was a man who could only do patient experiments—with a tragic impatience, in agony, against the clamoringof his instincts that yelled against the priceless lonelinessthat is the one condition for all true searching. He hadvisions of himself at the head o* important committees,and you can feel his dreams of medals and banquets andthe hosannahs of multitudes. . . .

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He must grab the discovery for England. He tried graymosquitoes and green and brown and dappled-winged mos-quitoes on Hindus rotten with malaria—but it was no go!He became sleepless and lost eleven pounds. He forgotthings. He could not repeat even those first crude experi-ments at Secunderabad.

And yet—all honor to Ronald Ross. He did marvelousthings in spite of himself. It was his travail that helpedthe learned, the expert, the indignant Battista Grassi to dothose clean superb experiments that must end in wipingmalaria from the earth.

VI

You might know Giovanni Battista Grassi would be theman to do what Ronald Ross had not quite succeeded inbringing off. He had been educated for a doctor, at Paviawhere that glittering Spallanzani had held forth amid ap-plause a hundred years before. Grassi had been educatedfor a doctor (Heaven knows why) because he had nosooner got his license than he set himself up in business asa searcher in zoology. With a certain amount of sniflish-ness he always insisted: “I am a zoologo—not a medico!”Deliberate as a glacier, precise as a ship’s chronometer, hestarted finding answers to the puzzles of nature. Correctanswers! His works were pronounced classics right afterhe published them—but it was his habit not to publishthem for years after he started to do them. He madeknown the secret comings and goings of the Society ofthe White Ants—not only this, but he discovered microbesthat plagued and preyed upon these white ants. He knewmore than any man in the world about eels—and you maybelieve it took a searcher with the insight of a Spallanzanito trace out the weird and romantic changes that eels un-dergo to fulfill their destiny as eels. Grassi was not strong

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He had abominable eyesight. He was full of an argumen-tative petulance. He was a contradictory combination of aman too modest to want his picture in the papers butbawling at the same time for the last jot and tittle ofcredit for everything that he did. And he did everything.Already, when he was only twenty-nine, before Ross haddreamt of becoming a searcher, Battista Grassi was a pro-fessor, and had published his famous monograph upon theChactognatha (I do not know what they are!).

Before Ronald Ross knew that anybody had ever thoughtof mosquitoes carrying malaria, Grassi had had the idea,had taken a whirl at experiments on it, but had used thewrong mosquito, and failed. But that failure started ideasstewing in his head while he worked at other things—andhow he worked! Grassi detested people who didn’t work.“Mankind,” he said, “is composed of those who work,those who pretend to work, and those who do neither.”He was ready to admit that he belonged in the first class,and it is entirely certain that he did belong there.

In 1898, the year of the triumph of Ronald Ross, Grassi,knowing nothing of Ross, never having heard of Ross,went back at malaria again. “Malaria is the worst problemItaly has to face! It desolates our richest farms! It attacksmillions in our lush lowlands! Why don’t you solve thatproblem?” So the politicians, to Battista Grassi. Then too,the air was full of whispers of the possibility that I don’tknow how many different diseases might be carried fromman to man by insects. There was that famous work ofTheobald Smith, and Grassi had an immense respect forTheobald Smith. But what probably finally set Grassiworking at malaria—you must remember he was a verypatriotic and jealous man—was the arrival of Robert Koch.Dean of the Microbe hunters of the world, Tsar of Science(his crown was only a little battered) Koch had come to

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Italy to prove that mosquitoes carry malaria from man toman.

Koch was an extremely grumpy, quiet, and restless mannow; sad because of the affair of his consumption cure(which had killed a considerable number of people);restless after the scandal of his divorce from Emmy Fraatz.So Koch went from one end of the world to the other,offering to conquer plagues bur not quite succeeding, try-ing to find happiness and not quite reaching it. His touchfaltered a little. . . . And now Koch met Battista Grassi,and Grassi said to Robert Koch:

“There arc [daces in Italy where mosquitoes are abso-lutely pestiferous—but there is no malaria at all in thoseplaces!”

“Well—what of it?”

“Right off, that would make you think mosquitoes hadnothing to do with malaria,” said Battista Grassi.

“So?” . . . Koch was enough to throw cold water onany logic!

“Yes—but here is the point,” persisted Grassi, “I have notfound a single place where there is malaria—where therearen’t mosquitoes too!”

“What of that?”

“This of that!” shouted Battista Grassi. “Either malariais carried by one special particular blood-sucking mosquito,out of the twenty or forty kinds of mosquitoes in Italy—or it isn’t carried by mosquitoes at all!”

“Hrrrm-p,” said Koch.

So Grassi made no hit with Robert Koch, and so Kochand Grassi went their two wavs, Grassi muttering to him-self: “Mosquitoes—without malaria . . . but never malaria—without mosquitoes! That means one special kind ofmosquito! I must discover the suspect. . .

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That was the homely reasoning of Battista Grassi. Hecompared himself to a village policeman trying to discoverthe criminal in a village murder. “You wouldn’t examinethe whole population of a thousand people one by one I”muttered Grassi. “You would try to locate the suspiciousrogues first. . .

His lectures for the year 1898 at the University of Romeover, he was a conscientious man who always gave morelectures than the law demanded, he needed a rest, and onthe 15th of July he took it. Armed with sundry fat test-tubes and a notebook, he sallied out from Rome to thoselow hot places and marshy desolations where no man butin idiot would go for a vacation. Unlike Ross, this Grassiwas a mosquito expert besides everything else that he was.His eyes—so red-rimmed and weak—were exceedingly sharpat spotting every difference between the thirty-odd differentkinds of mosquitoes that he met. He went around withthe fat test-tube in his hand, his ear cocked for buzzes.The buzz dies away as the mosquito lights. She has lit inan impossible place. Or she has lit in a disgusting place.No matter, Battista Grassi is up behind her, pounces on her,claps his fat test-tube over her, puts a grubby thumb overthe mouth of the test-tube, paws over his prize and pullsher apart, scrawls little cramped pothooks in his notebook.That was Battista Grassi, up and down and around thenastiest places in Italy all that summer.

So it was he cleared a dozen or twenty different mos-quitoes of the suspicion of the crime of malaria—he wasalways finding these beasts in places where there was nomalaria. He ruled out two dozen different kinds of graymosquitoes and brindled mosquitoes, that he found any-where—in saloons and bedrooms and the sacristies of cathe-drals, biting babies and nuns and drunkards. “You are

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innocent!” shouted Battista Grassi at these mosquitoes.“For where you are none of these nuns or babies or drunk-ards suffers from malaria!”

You will grant this was a most outlandish microbe hunt-ing of Grasses. He went around making a nuisance ofhimself. He insinuated himself into the already sufficientlyannoyed families of those hot malarious towns. He snoopedannoyingly into the affairs of these annoyed families: “Isthere malaria in your house? . . . Has there ever beenmalaria in your house? . . . How many have never hadmalaria in your house . . . how many mosquito bites didyour sick baby have last week? . . . What kind of mos-quitoes bit him?” He was utterly without a sense of hu-mor. And he was annoying.

“No,” the indignant head of the house might tell him,“we suffer from malaria—but we are not bothered by mos-quitoes!” Battista Grassi would never take his word forthat. He snouted into pails and old crocKs in the backyards. He peered beneath tables and behind sacred imagesand under beds. He even discovered mosquitoes hiding inshoes under those beds. . . .

So it was—it is most fantastical—that Battista Grassiwent more than two-thirds of the way to solving thispuzzle of how malaria gets from sick men to healthy onesbefore he had ever made a single experiment in his labora-tory! For, everywhere where there was malaria, there weremosquitos. And such mosquitoes! T hey were certainly avery special definite sort of blood-sucking mosquito Grassifound.

“Zan-za-ro-ne, we call that kind of mosquito,” the house-holders told him.

Always, where the “zan-za-ro-ne” buzzed, there Grass:found deep flushed faces on rumpled beds, or faces withchattering teeth going towards those beds. Always where

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that special and definite mosquito sang at twilight, Grassifound fields waiting for some one to till them, and fromthe houses of the little villages that sat in these fields, hesaw processions emerging, and long black boxes. . . .

There was no mistaking this mosquito, zanzarone, onceyou had spotted her; she was a frivolous gnat that flew upfrom the marshes towards the lights of the towns; she wasan elegant mosquito proud of four dark spots on her lightbrown wings; she was not a too dignified insect who satin an odd way with the tail-end of her body sticking upin the air [that was one way he could spot her, for theCulex mosquitoes drooped their tails]; she was a braveblood-sucker who thought: “The bigger they are the moreblood I get out of them!” So zanzarone preferred horses tomen and men to rabbits. That was zanzarone, and thenaturalists had given her the name Anopheles clavigcr manyyears before. Anopheles clcwigerl This became the sloganof Battista Grassi. You can see him, shuffling along be-hind lovers in the dusk, making fists of his fingers to keephimself from pouncing on the zanzarone who made mealsoff their regardless necks. ... You can sec this Grassi, sit-ting in a stagecoach with no springs, oblivious to bumps,deaf to the chatter of his fellow-passengers, with absenteyes counting the Anopheles claviger he had discovered—with delight—riding on the ceiling of the wagon in whichhe journeyed from one utterly terrible little malariousvillage to another still more cursed.

“I’ll try them on myself!” Grassi cried. He went upnorth to his home in Rovellasca. He taught boys how tospot the anopheles mosquito. The boys brought boxes fullof these she-zanzarone from towns where malaria rages.Grassi took these boxes to his bedroom, put on his nightshirt, opened the boxes, crawled into bed—but curse it!not one of the zanzarone bit him. Instead they flew out of

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his room and bit Grassi’s mother, “fortunately without illeffect!”

Then Grassi went back to Rome to his lectures, and onSeptember 28th of 1898, before ever he had done a singleserious experiment, he read his paper before the famous andancient Academy of the Lincei: “It is the anopheles mos-quito that carries malaria if any mosquito carries malaria. . And he told them he was suspicious of two otherbrands of mosquitoes—but that was absolutely all, out ofthe thirty or forty different tribes that infected the lowplaces of Italy.

Then came an exciting autumn for Battista Grassi andan entertaining autumn for the wits of Rome, and a mostimportant autumn for mankind. Besides all that it was amost itchy autumn for Mr. Sola, who for six years hadbeen a patient of Dr. Bastianelli in the Hospital of theHoly Spirit, high up on the top floor of this hospital thatsat on a high hill of Rome. Here zanzarone never came.Here nobody ever got malaria. Here was the place for ex-periments. And here was Mr. Sola, who had never hadmalaria, every twist and turn of whose health Dr. Bas-tianelli knew, who told Battista Grassi that he wouldnot mind being shut up with three different brands ofhungry she-mosquitoes every night for a month.

Grassi and Bignami and Bastianelli started off, strangelyenough, with those two minor mosquito suspects—those twoculexcs that Grassi had discovered always hanging aroundmalarious places along with the zanzarone. . . . They tor-tured Mr. Sola each night with hundreds of these mos-quitoes. They shut poor Mr. Sola up in that room withthose devils and turned olf the light. . . .

Nothing happened. Sola was a tough man. Sola showednot a sign of malaria.

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(It is not clear why Grassi did not start of! by loosinghis zanzarone at this Mr. Sola.)

Maybe it was because Robert Koch had laughed publiclyat this idea of the zanzarone—Grassi does admit that dis-couraged him.

But, one fine morning, Grassi hurried out of Rome toMoletta and came back with a couple of little bottles inwhich buzzed ten fine female anopheles mosquitoes. Thatnight Mr. Sola had a particularly itchy time of it. Tendays later this stoical old gentleman shook horribly with achill, his body temperature shot up into a high fever—andhis blood swarmed with the microbes of malaria.

“The rest of the history of Sola’s case has no interest forus,” wrote Grassi, “but it is now certain that mosquitoescan carry malaria, to a place where there arc no mosquitoesin nature, to a place where no case of malaria has ever oc-curred, to a man who has never had malaria—Mr. Sola!”

Over the country went Grassi once more, chasing zan-zarone, hoarding zanzarone: in his laboratory he tenderlyraised zanzarone on winter-melons and sugar-water; andin the top of the hospital of the Holy Spirit, in those highmosquito-proof rooms, Grassi and Bastianelli (to say nothingof another assistant, Bignami) loosed zanzarone into thebedrooms of people who had never had malaria—and sogave them malaria.

It was an itchy autumn and an exciting one. The news-papers became sarcastic and hinted that the blood of thesepoor human experimental animals would be on the headsof these three conspirators. But Grassi said: to the devilwith the newspapers, he cheered when his human animalsgot sick, he gave them doses of quinine as soon as he wassure his zanzarone had given them malaria, and then “theirhistories had no further interest for him.”

By now Grassi had read of those experiments of Ronald

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Ross with birds. “Pretty crude stuff!” thought this expertGrassi, but when he came to look for those strange doingsof the circles and warts and spindle-shaped threads in thestomachs and saliva-glands of his she-anopheles, he foundthat Ronald Ross was exactly right! The microbe ofhuman malaria in the body of his zanzarone did exactlythe same things the microbe of bird malaria had done inthe bodies of those mosquitoes Ronald Ross hadn’t knownthe names of. Grassi didn’t waste too much time praisingRonald Ross, who, Heaven knows, deserved praise, neededpraise, and above all wanted praise. Not Grassi!

“By following my own way I have discovered that aspecial mosquito carried human malaria!” he cried, andthen he set out—“It is with great regret I do this,” heexplained—to demolish Robert Koch. Koch had beenfumbling and muddling. Koch thought malaria went fromman to man just as Texas fever traveled from cow to cow.Koch believed baby mosquitoes inherited malaria fromtheir mothers, bit people, and so infected them. And Kochhad sniffed at the zanzarone.

So Grassi raised baby zanzarone. He let them hatch outin a room, and every evening in this room, for four months,sat this Battista Grassi with six or seven of his friends.What friends he must have had! For every evening theysat there in the dusk, barelegged with their trousers rolledup to their knees, bare-armed with their shirt sleeves rolledup to their elbows. Some of these friends, whom the anoph-eles relished particularly, were stabbed every night fiftyor sixty times! So Grassi demolished Robert Koch, and sohe proved his point, because, though the baby anopheleswere children of mother mosquitoes who came from themost pestiferous malaria holes in Italy, not one of Grassi’sfriends had a sign of malaria!

“It is not the mosquito’s children, but only the mosquito

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who herself bites a malaria sufferer—it is only that mos-quito who can give malaria to healthy people!” criedGrassi.

Grassi was as persistent as Ronald Ross had been erratic.He plugged up every little hole in his theory that anoph-eles is the one special and particular mosquito to bringmalaria to men. Ry a hundred air-tight experiments heproved the malaria of birds could not be carried by themosquitoes who brought it to men and that the malariaof men could never be strewn abroad by the mosquitoeswho brought it to birds. Nothing was too much troublefor this Battista Grassi! He knew as much about the habitsand customs and traditions of those zanzarone as if hehimself were a mosquito and the king and ruler of mos-quitoes. . . .

VII

What is more, Battista Grassi was a practical man, andas I have said, an excessively patriotic man. He wanted tosee his discovery do well by Italy, for he loved his Italyfaithfully and violently. His experiments were no soonerfinished, the last good strong nail was no sooner driveninto the house of his case against the anopheles, than hebegan telling people, and writing in newspapers, and preach-ing—you might almost say he went about, bellowing tillhe bored everybody:

“Keep away the zanzarone and in a few years Italy willbe free from malaria!”

He became a fanatic on the best ways to kill anopheles:he was indignant (that man had no sense of humor!)because townspeople insisted on strolling through theirstreets in the dusk. “How can you be so foolish as to walkin the twilight?” Grassi asked them. “That is the verytime when the malaria mosquito is waiting for you.”

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He was the very type of the silly sanitarian. “Don’t goout in the warm evenings,” he told every one, “unless youwear heavy cotton gloves and veils!” (Imagine youngItalians making love in heavy cotton gloves and veils.) Sothere was a good deal of sniggering at this professor whohad become a violent missionary against the zanzarone.

But Battista Grassi was a practical man! “One family,staying free from the tortures of malaria—that would beworth ten years of preaching—I’ll have to show them!”he muttered. So, in 1900, after his grinding experimentsof 1898 and ’99, this tough man set out to “show them.”He went down into the worst malaria region of Italy, alongthe railroad line that ran through the plain of Capaccio.It was high summer. It was deadly summer there, andevery summer the poor wretches of railroad workers, mis-erable farmers whose blood was gutted by the malariapoison, would leave that plain, at the cost of their jobs,at the cost of food, at the risk of starvation—to the hillsto flee the malaria. And every summer from the swampsat twilight swarmed the malignant hosts of female zan-zaronc; at each hot dusk they made their meals and didtheir murders, and in the night, bellies full of blood, theysang back to their marshes, to marry and lay eggs andhatch out thousands more of their kind.

In the summer of 1900 Battista Grassi went to the plainof Capaccio. The hot days were just beginning, the anoph-eles were on the inarch. In the windows and on thedoors of ten little houses of station-masters and employeesof the railroad Grassi put up wire screens, so fine-meshedand so perfect that the slickest and the slightest of the zan-zarone could not slip through them. Then Grassi, armedwith authority from the officials of the railroad, suppliedwith money by the Queen of Italy, became a task-master,a Pharaoh with lashes. One hundred and twelve souls—

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railroad men and their families—became the experimentalanimals of Battista Grassi and had to be careful to do ashe told them. They had to stay indoors in the beautifulbut dangerous twilight. Careless of death—especially un-seen death—as all healthy human beings are careless, theseone hundred and twelve Italians had to take precautions,to avoid the stabs of mosquitoes. Grassi had the devil of atime with them. Grassi scolded them. Grassi kept theminside those screens by giving them prizes of money. Grassiset them an indignant example by coming down to Al-banella, most deadly place of all, and sleeping two nightsa week behind those screens.

All around those screen-protected station houses thezanzaronc swarmed in humming thousands—it was afrightful year for mosquitoes. Into the unscreened neigh-boring station houses (there were four hundred and fifteenwretches living in those houses), the zanzarone swoopedand sought their prey. Almost to a man, woman, andchild, those four hundred and fifteen men, women andchildren fell sick with the malaria.

And of those one hundred and twelve prisoners behindthe screens at night? They were rained on during the day,they breathed that air that for a thousand years the wisestmen were sure was the cause of malaria, they fell asleepat twilight, they did all of the things the most eminentphysicians had always said it was dangerous to do, but inthe dangerous evenings they stayed behind screens—andonly five of them got the malaria during all that summer.Mild cases these were, too, maybe only relapses from theyear before, said Grassi.

“In the so-much-feared station of Albanella, from whichfor years so many coffins had been carried, one could liveas healthily as in the healthiest spot in Italy!” cried Grassi.

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VIII

Such was the fight of Ronald Ross and Battista Grassiagainst the assassins of the red blood corpuscles, the sappersof vigorous life, the destroyer of men, the chief scourge ofthe lands of the South—the microbe of malaria. Therewere aftermaths of this fight, some of them too long to tell,and some too painful. There were good aftermaths andbad ones. There are fertile fields now, and healthy babies,in Italy and Africa and India and America, where oncethe hum of the anopheles brought thin blood and chatter-ing teeth, brought desolate land and death.

There is the Panama Canal. . . •

Then there is Sir Ronald Ross, who was—as once hehoped and dreamed—given enthusiastic banquets.

There is Ronald Ross who got the Nobel Prize of seventhousand eight hundred and eighty pounds sterling for hisdiscovery of how the gray mosquito carries malaria tobirds. . . .

There is Battista Grassi who didn’t get the Nobel Prize,and is now unknown, except in Italy, where they huzzahedfor him and made him a Senator (he never missed a meet-ing of that Senate to within a year of his death).

All these are, for the most part, good, even if some ofthem are slightly ironical aftermaths.

Then there is Ronald Ross, who had learned the hardgame of searching while he made his discovery about thegray mosquito—you would say his best years of work werejust beginning—there is Ronald Ross, insinuating Grassiwas a thief, hinting that Grassi was a charlatan, sayingGrassi had added almost nothing to the proof that mos-quitoes carry malaria to men I

There was Grassi—justifiably purple with indignation,

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writing violent papers in reply. ... You cannot blamehim! But why will such searchers scuffle, when there areso many things left to find? You would think—of courseit would be so in a novel—that they could have ignoredeach other, or could have said: “The facts of scienceare greater than the little men who find those facts!”—andthen have gone on searching, and saving.

For the fight has only just begun. The day I finish thistalc, it is twenty-five years after the perfect experiment ofGrassi, comes this news item from Tokio—it is stuck awaydown in a corner of an inside page of a newspaper:

“The population of the Ryukyu Islands, which lie betweenJapan and Formosa, is rapidly dying off. . . . Malaria isblamed principally. In eight villages of the Yacyama group. . . not a single baby has been born for the last thirtyyears. In Nozoko village . . . one sick old woman was theonly inhabitant. . . .”

CHAPTER XI

WALTER REED

In the Interest of Science—and for Humanity!i

With yellow fever it was different—there were no brawlsabout it.

Everybody is agreed that Walter Reed—head of the Yel-low Fever Commission—was a courteous man and a blame-less one, that he was a mild man and a logical: there is notone particle of doubt he had to risk human lives; animalssimply will not catch yellow fever!

Then it is certain that the ex-lumberjack, James Carroll,was perfectly ready to let go his own life to prove Reed’s

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point, and he was not too sentimental about the lives o£others when he needed to prove a point—which might andmight not be what you would call a major point.

All Cubans (who were on the spot and ought to know)arc agreed that those American soldiers who volunteeredfor the fate of guinea-pigs were brave beyond imagining.All Americans who were then in Cuba are sure that thoseSpanish immigrants who volunteered for the fate of guinea-pigs were not brave, but money-loving—for didn’t each oneof them get two hundred dollars?

Of course you might protest that fate hit Jesse Lazear ahard knock—but it was his own fault: why didn’t he brushthat mosquito ofT the back of his hand instead of letting herdrink her fill? Then, too, fate has been kind to his mem-ory; the United States Government named a Battery inBaltimore Harbor in his honor! And that same govern-ment has been more than kind to his wife: the widowLazear gets a pension of fifteen hundred dollars a year!You see, there are no arguments—and that makes it funto tell this story of yellow fever. And aside from the pleas-ure, it has to be told: this history is absolutely necessaryto the book of Microbe Hunters. It vindicates Pasteur!At last Pasteur, from his handsome tomb in that basementin Paris, can tell the world: “I told you so!” Because, in1926, there is hardly enough of the poison of yellow feverleft in the world to put on the points of six pins; in afew years there may not be a single speck of that virus lefton earth—it will be as completely extinct as the dinosaurs—unless there is a catch in the fine gruesome experimentsof Reed and his Spanish immigrants and Americansoldiers. . . .

It was a grand cooperative fight, that scotching of theyellow jack. It was fought by a strange crew, and the fightwas begun by a curious old man, with enviable mutton

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chop whiskers—his name was Doctor Carlos Finlay—whomade an amazingly right guess, who was a terrible muddlerat experiments, who was considered by all good Cubansand wise doctors to be a Theorizing Old Fool. What acrazy crank is Finlay, said everybody.

For everybody knew just how to fight that most panic*striking plague, yellow fever; everybody had a different ideaof just how to combat it. You should fumigate silks andsatins and possessions of folks before they left yellow fevertowns—no! that is not enough: you should burn them.You should bury, burn, and utterly destroy these silks andsatins and possessions before they come into yellow fevertowns. It was wise not to shake hands with friends whosefamilies were dying of yellow fever; it was perfectly safe toshake hands with them. It was best to burn down houseswhere yellow fever had lurked—no! it was enough tosmoke them out with sulphur. Hut there was one thingnearly everybody in North, Central, and South America hadbeen agreed upon for nearly two hundred years, and thatwas this: when folks of a town began to turn yellow andhiccup and vomit black, by scores, by hundreds, every day—the only thing to do was to get up and get out of thattown. Because the yellow murderer had a way of crawlingthrough walls and slithering along the ground and poppingaround corners—it could even pass through fires!—it coulddie and rise from the dead, that yellow murderer; andafter everybody (including the very best physicians) hadfought it by doing as many contrary things as they couldthink of as frantically as they could do them—the yellowjack kept on killing, until suddenly it got fed up withkilling. In North America that always came with thefrosts in the fall. . . .

This was the state of scientific knowledge about yellowfever up to the year 1900. But from between his mutton

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chop whiskers Carlos Finlay of Habana howled in a scorn-ful wilderness: “You are all wrong—yellow fever is causedby a mosquito!”

There was a bad state of affairs in San Cristobal deHabana in Cuba in 1900. The yellow jack had killed thou-sands more American soldiers than the bullets of the Span-iards had killed. And it wasn’t like most diseases, whichconsiderately pounce upon poor dirty people—it had killedmore than one-third of the officers of General LeonardWood’s staff, and staff officers—as all soldiers know—arethe cleanest of all officers and the best protected. GeneralWood had thundered orders; Habana had been scrubbed;happy dirty Cubans had been made into unhappy cleanCubans—“No stone had been left unturned”—in vain!There was more yellow fever in Habana than there hadbeen in twenty years!

Cablegrams from Habana to Washington and on June25th of 1900 Major Walter Reed came to Qucmados inCuba with orders to “give special attention to questionsrelating to the cause and prevention of yellow fever.” Itwas a big order. Considering who the man Walter Reedwas, it was altogether too big an order. Pasteur had triedit! Of course, in certain ways—though you would say theyhad nothing to do with hunting microbes—Walter Reedhad qualifications. He was the best of soldiers; fourteenyears and more he had served on the western plains andmountains; he had been a brave angel flying through bliz-zards to the bedsides of sick settlers—he had shunned thedangers of beer and bottle-pool in the officers’ mess andresisted the seductions of alcoholic nights at draw poker.He had a strong moral nature. He was gentle. But it willtake a genius to dig out this microbe of the yellow jack,

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you say—and are geniuses gentle? Just the same, you willsee that this job needed particularly a strong moral nature,and then, besides, since 1891 Walter Reed had been doinga bit of microbe hunting. He had done some odd jobs ofsearching at the very best medical school under the mosteminent professor of microbe hunting in America—and thatprofessor had known Robert Koch, intimately.

So Walter Reed came to Quemados, and as he went intothe yellow fever hospital there, more than enough youngAmerican soldiers passed him, going out, on their backs,feet first. . . . There were going to be plenty of cases towork on all right—fatal cases! Dr. James Carroll was withWalter Reed, and he was not what you would call gentle,but you will see in a moment what a soldier-searcher JamesCarroll was. And Reed found Jesse Lazear waiting forhim—Lazear was a European-trained microbe hunter, agedthirty-four, with a wife and two babies in the States, andwith doom in his eyes. Finally there was Aristides Agra-monte (who was a Cuban)—it was to be his job to cutup the dead bodies, and very well he did that job, thoughhe never became famous because he had had yellow feveralready and so ran no risks. These four were the YellowFever Commission.

The first thing the Commission did was to fail to findany microbe whatever in the first eighteen cases of yellowfever that they probed into. There were many severe casesin those eighteen; there were four of those eighteen caseswho died; there was not one of those eighteen cases thatthey didn’t claw through from stem to gudgeon, so tospeak, drawing blood, making cultures, cutting up the deadones, making endless careful cultures—and not one bacillusdid they find. All the time—it was July and the very worsttime for yellow fever—the soldiers were coming out of thehospital of Las Animas feet first. The Commission failed

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absolutely to find any cause, but that failure put them onthe right track. That is one of the humors of microbehunting—the way men make their finds! Theobald Smithfound out about those ticks because he had faith in certainfarmers; Ronald Ross found out the doings of those graymosquitoes because Patrick Manson told him to; Grassidiscovered the zanzarone carrying malaria because he waspatriotic. And now Walter Reed had failed in the very firstpart—and anybody would say it was the most importantpart—of his work. What to do? There was nothing to do.And so Reed had time to hear the voice of that TheorizingOld Fool, Dr. Carlos Finlay, of Habana, shouting: “Yellowfever is caused by a mosquito!"

The Commission went to call on Dr. Finlay, and thatold gentleman—everybody had laughed at him, nobodyhad listened to him—was very glad to explain his fooltheory to the Commission. He told them the ingenious butvague reasons why he thought it was mosquitoes carriedyellow fever; he showed them records of those awful ex-periments, which would convince nobody; he gave themsome little black eggs shaped like cigars and said: “Thoseare the eggs of the criminal!” And Walter Reed tookthose eggs, and gave them to Lazear, who had been in Italyand knew a thing or two about mosquitoes, and Lazearput the eggs into a warm place to hatch into wigglers,which presently wiggled themselves into extremely prettymosquitoes, with silver markings on their backs—markingsthat looked like a lyre. Now Walter Reed had failed, butyou have to give him credit for being a sharp-eyed manwith plenty of common sense—and then too, as you willsee, he was extraordinarily lucky. While he was failing tofind bacilli, even in the dreadful cases, with bloodshot eyesand chests yellow as gold, with hiccoughs and with thoseprophetic retchings—while he was failing, Walter Reed

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noticed that the nurses who handled those cases, weresoiled by those cases, never got yellow fever! They werenon-immunes too, those nurses, but they didn’t get yellowfever.

“If this disease were caused by bacillus, like cholera, orplague, some of those nurses certainly should get it,” arguedWalter Reed to his Commission.

Then all kinds of strange tricks of yellow fever struckWalter Reed. He watched cases of the disease pop upmost weirdly in Quemados. A man in a house in 102Real Street came down with it; then it jumped around thecorner to 20 General Lee Street, and from there it hoppedacross the road—and not one of these families had anythingto do with each other, hadn’t seen each other, even!

“That smells like something carrying the disease throughthe air to those houses,” said Reed. There were variousother exceedingly strange things about yellow fever—theyhad been discovered by an American, Carter. A man camedown with yellow fever in a house. For two or threeweeks nothing more happened—the man might die, hemight have got better and gone away, but at the end ofthat two weeks, bang! a bunch of other cases broke out inthat house. “That two weeks makes it look as if the viruswere taking time to grow in some insect,” said Reed, to hisCommission who thought it was silly, but they weresoldiers.

“So we will try Finlay’s notion about mosquitoes,” saidWalter Reed, for all of the just mentioned reasons, butparticularly because there was nothing else for the Com-mission to do.

That was easy to say, but how to go on with it? Every-body knew perfectly well that you cannot give yellow feverto any animal—not even to a monkey or an ape. To makeany kind of experiment to prove mosquitoes carry yellow

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fever you must have experimental animals, and that meantnothing more nor less than human animals. But give hu-man beings yellow fever! In some epidemics—there wererecords of them!—eighty-five men out of a hundred diedof it, in some fifty out of every hundred—almost never lessthan twenty out of every hundred. It would he murder!But that is where the strong moral nature of Walter Reedcame to help him. Here was a blameless man, a Christianman, and a man—though he was mild—who was mad tohelp his fellow men. And if you could prove that yellowfever was only carried by mosquitoes. . . .

So, on one hot night after a day among dying men atPinar del Rio, he faced his Commission: “If the membersof the Commission take the risk first—if they let themselvesbe bitten by mosquitoes that have fed on yellow fevercases, that will set an example to American soldiers, andthen—” Reed looked at Lazear, and then at James Carroll.

“I am ready to take a bite,” said Jesse Lazear, who hada wife and two small children.

“You can count on me, sir,” said James Carroll, whosetotal assets were his searcher’s brain, and his miserablepay as an assistant-surgeon in the army. (His liabilitieswere a wife and five children.)

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Then Walter Reed (he had been called home to Wash-ington to make a report on work done in the Spanish War)gave elaborate instructions to Carroll and Lazear and Agramonte. They were secret instructions, and savage instruc-tions, when you consider the mild man he was. It was animmoral business—it was a breach of discipline in its way,for Walter Reed then had no permission from the highmilitary authorities to start it. So Reed left for Washington,and Lazear and Carroll set off on the wildest, most daring

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journey any two microbe hunters had e\er taken. Lazear?You could not see the doom in his eyes—the gleam ofthe searcher outshone it. Carroll? That was a soldier whocared no damn for death or courts-martial—Carroll was amicrobe hunter of the great line. . . .

Lazear went down between the rows of beds on whichlay men, doomed men with faces yellow as the leaves ofautumn, delirious men with bloodshot eyes. He bit thosemen with his silver-striped she-mosquitoes; carefully hecarried these blood-filled beasts back to their glass homes,in which were little saucers of water and little lumps ofsugar. Here the she-mosquitoes digested their meal ofyellow fever blood, and buzzed a little, and waited for thetest.

“We should remember malaria,” Reed had told Lazearand Carroll. “In that disease it takes two or three weeksfor the mosquito to become dangerous—maybe its thesame here.”

But look at the bold face of Jesse Lazear, and tell me ifthat was a patient man! Not he. Somehow he collectedseven volunteers, who so far as I can find have remainednameless, since the test was done in dark secrecy. To theseseven men—whom for all I know he may have shanghaied—but first of all to himself, Lazear applied those mosquitoeswho a few days before had fed on men who now weredead. . . .

But alas, they all stayed fit as fiddles, and that discour-aged Lazear.

But there was James Carroll. For years he had been theright-hand man of Walter Reed. He had come into thearmy as a buck private and had been a corporal and asergeant for years—obeying orders was burned into hisvery bones—and Major Reed had said: “Try mosquitoes!”What is more, what Major Reed thought was right, James

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Carroll thought was right, too, and Major Reed thoughtthere was something in the notion of that Old TheorizingFool. But in the army, thoughts are secondary—MajorReed had left them saying: “Try mosquitoes!”

So James Carroll reminded the discouraged Lazear: “Iam ready I” He told Lazear to bring out the most danger-ous mosquito in his collection—not one that had bittenonly a single case, but he must use a mosquito that hadbitten many cases—and they must he bad cases—of yellowfever. That mosquito must be as dangerous as possible!On the twenty-seventh of August, Jesse Lazear picked outwhat he thought to be his champion mosquito, and thiscreature, which had fed on four cases of yellow fever, twoof them severe ones, settled down on the arm of JamesCarroll.

That soldier watched her while she felt around with herstinger. . . . What did he think as he watched her swellinto a bright balloon with his blood? Nobody knows. Buthe could think, what everybody knows: “I am forty-sixyears old, and in yellow fever the older the fewer—get bet-ter.” He was forty-six years old. He had a wife and fivechildren, but that evening James Carroll wrote to WalterReed:

“If there is anything in the mosquito theory, I should geta good dose of yellow fever!” He did.

Two days later he felt tired and didn’t want to visitpatients in the yellow fever ward. Two days after that hewas really sick: “I must have malaria!” he cried, and wentto the laboratory under his own power, to squint at hisown blood under the microscope. But no malaria. Thatnight his eyes were bloodshot, his face a dusky red. Thenext morning Lazear packed Carroll off to the yellowfever wards, and there he lay, near to death for days anddays. . . . There was one minute when he thought his

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heart had stopped . . . and that, as you will see, was abad minute for Assistant-Surgeon Carroll.

He always said those were the proudest days of his life. “Iwas the first case to come down with yellow fever afterthe experimental bite of a mosquito!” said Carroll.

Then there was that American private soldier they called“X.Y.”—these outlaw searchers called him “X.Y.,” thoughhe was really William Dean, of Grand Rapids, Michigan.While James Carroll was having his first headaches, theybit this X.Y. with four mosquitoes—the one that nearlykilled Carroll, and then three other silver-striped beautiesbesides, who had fed on six men that were fairly sick, andfour men that were very sick with yellow fever and twomen that died.

Now everything was fine with the experiments of Que*mados. Eight men had been bitten, it is true, and were fitas fiddles—but the last two, James Carroll and X.Y., theywere real experimental guinea-pigs, those two, they hadboth got yellow fever—and James Carroll’s heart hadnearly stopped, but now they were both getting better, andCarroll was on the heights, writing to Walter Reed, wait-ing proudly for his chief to come back—to show him therecords. Only Jesse Lazear was a little cynical about thesetwo cases, because Lazear was a fine experimenter, a tightone, a man who had to have every condition just so, like areal searcher—and, thought Lazear, “It is too bad seeingthe nerve of Carroll and X.Y.—but both of them exposedthemselves in dangerous zones once or twice, before theycame down. It wasn’t an absolutely perfect experiment—itisn’t sure that my mosquitoes gave them yellow fever!” SoLazear was skeptical, but orders were orders, and everyafternoon he went to those rows of beds at Las Animas, inthe room with the faint strange smell, and here he turnedhis test-tubes upside-down on the arms of boys with blood-

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shot eyes, and let his she-mosquitoes suck their fill. ButSeptember 13th was a bad day, it was an unlucky day forJesse Lazear, for while he was at this silly job of feedinghis mosquitoes, a stray mosquito settled down on the backof his hand. “Oh! that’s nothing!” he thought. “Thatwouldn’t be the right kind of mosquito anyway!” he mut-tered, and he let the mosquito drink her fill—though,mind you, she was a stray beast that lived in this wardwhere men were dying!

That was September 13th.

“On the evening of September 18th . . . Dr. Lazear com-plained of feeling out of sorts, and had a chill at 8 p.m.,”says a hospital record of Las Animas. . . .

“September 19: Twelve o’clock noon,” goes on that la-conic record, “temperature 102.4 degrees, pulse 112. Eyesinjected, face suffused. [That means bloodshot and red]

. . . 6 p. At. temperature 103.8 degrees, pulse, 106. Jaundiceappeared on the third day. The subsequent history of thiscase was one of progressive and fatal yellow fever” [andthe record softens a little], “the death of our lamented col-league having occurred on the evening of September 25,1900.”

IV

Then Reed came back to Cuba, and Carroll met himwith enthusiasm, and Walter Reed was sad for Lazear, butvery happy about those two Successful cases of Carroll andX.Y.—and then, and then (brushing aside tears for Lazear)even in that there was the Hand of God, there was some-thing for Science* “As Dr. Lazear was bitten by a mos-quito while present in the wards of a yellow fever hos-pital,” wrote Walter Reed, “one must, at least, admit thepossibility of this insect’s contamination by a previous bite

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of a yellow fever patient. This case of accidental infectiontherefore cannot jail to be of interest. . .

“Now it is my turn to take the bite!’’ said Walter Reed,but he was fifty years old, and they persuaded him not to.“But we must prove it!” he insisted, so gently, that, hear-ing his musical voice and looking at his chin that did notstick out like the chin of a he-man, you might think Wal-ter Reed was wavering (after all, here was one man deadout of three).

“But we must prove it,” said that soft voice, and Reedwent to General Leonard Wood, and told him the excitingevents that had happened. Who could he less of a molly-coddle than this Wood? And he gave Walter Reed permis-sion to go as far as he liked. He gave him money to builda camp of seven tents and two little houses—to say nothingof a flagpole—but what was best of all Wood gave himmoney to buy men, who would get handsomely paid fortaking a sure one chance out of five of never having achance to spend that money! So Walter Reed said: “Thankyou, General,” and one mile from Qucmados they pitchedseven tents and raised a flagpole, and flew an American flagand called that place Camp Lazear (three cheers for La-zear!), and you will see what glorious things occurredthere.

Now, nothing is more sure than this: that every man ofthe great line of microbe hunters is different from everyother man of them, but every man Jack of them has onething in common: they are original. They were all orig-inal, excepting Walter Reed—whom you cannot say wouldbe shot for his originality, seeing that this business of mos-quitoes and various bugs and ticks carrying diseases wasvery much in the air in those last ten years of the nine-teenth century. It was natural for a man to think of that!But he was by all odds the most moral of the great line

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of microbe hunters—aside from being a very thoroughclean-cut experimenter—and now that Walter Reed’s moralnature told him: “You must kill men to save them!” heset out to plan a series of air-tight tests—never was there agood man who thought of more hellish and dastardly tests!

And he was exact. Every man about to be bit by a mos-quito must stay locked up for days and days and weeks, inthat sun-baked Camp Lazear—to keep him away from alldanger of accidental contact with yellow fever. Therewould be no catch in these experiments! And then WalterReed let it be known, to the American soldiers in Cuba,that there was another war on, a war lor the saving ofmen—were there men who would volunteer? Before theink was dry on the announcements Private Kisscngcr ofOhio stepped into his office, and with him came John J.Moran, who wasn’t even a soldier— he was a civilian clerkin the office of General Eitzhugh Lee. “You can try it onus, sir!” they told him.

Walter Reed was a thoroughly conscientious man. “Hut,men, do you realize the danger?” And he told them ofthe headaches and the hiccups and the black vomit—andhe told them of fearful epidemics in which not a man hadlived to carry news or tell the horrors. . . .

“We know,” said Private Kisscnger and John J. Moranof Ohio, “we volunteer solely for the cause of humanityand in the interest of science.”

Then Walter Reed told them of the generosity of Gen-eral Wood. A handsome sum of money they would get—two hundred, maybe three hundred dollars, if the silver-striped she-mosquitocs did things to them that would givethem one chance out of fi\e not. to spend that money.

“The one condition on which we volunteer, sir,” said Pri-vate Kissenger and civilian clerk John J. Moran of Ohio, “isthat we get no compensation for it.”

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To the tip of his cap went the hand of Walter Reed(who was a major): “Gentlemen, I salute you!” And thatday Kissenger and John J. Moran went into the prepara-tory quarantine, that would make them first-class, unques-tionable guinea-pigs, above suspicion and beyond reproach.On the 5th of December Kissenger furnished nice fullmeals for five mosquitoes—two of them had bitten fatalcases fifteen days and nineteen days before. Presto! Fivedays later he had the devil of a backache, two days moreand he was turning yellow—it was a perfect case, and inhis quarters Walter Reed thanked God, for Kissenger gotbetter! Then great days came to Reed and Carroll andAgramonte—for, if they weren’t exactly overrun withyoung Americans who were ready to throw away theirlives in the interest of science—and for humanity; still therewere ignorant people, just come to Cuba from Spain, whocould very well use two hundred dollars. There were fiveof these mercenary fellows—whom I shall simply have tocall “Spanish immigrants,” or I could call them Man 1, 2,3, and 4—just as microbe hunters often mark animals:“Rabbit 1, 2, 3, and 4”—anyway they were bitten, care-fully, by mosquitoes who, when you take averages, weremuch more dangerous than machine gun bullets. Theyearned their two hundred dollars—for four out of five ofthem had nice typical (doctors would look scientific andcall them beautiful) cases of yellow fever! It was a tri-umph! It was sure! Not one of these fnen had been any-where near yellow fever—like so many mice they had beenkept in their screened tents at Quemados. If they hadn’tbeen ignorant immigrants—hardly more intelligent thananimals, you might say—they might have been bored, be-cause nothing had happened to them excepting—the stabsof silver-striped she-mosquitoes. ...

“Rejoice with me, sweetheart,” Walter Reed wrote to his

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wife, “as, aside from the antitoxin of diphtheria and Koch'sdiscovery of the tubercle bacillus, it will be regarded as themost important piece of work, scientifically, during thenineteenth century. . .

Walter Reed was so thorough that you can call him orig-inal, as original as any of the microbe hunters of the greatline—for he was certainly original in his thoroughness. Hemight have called it a day—you would swear he wastempted to call it a day: eight men had got yellow feverfrom mosquito bites, and only one—what amazing luck!—had died.

“But can yellow fever be carried in any other way?”asked Reed.

Everybody believed that clothing and bedding and posses-sions of yellow fever victims were deadly—millions of dol-lars worth of clothing and bedding had been destroyed; theSurgeon-General believed it; every eminent physician inAmerica, North, South and Central (excepting that old foolFinlay) believed it. “But can it?” asked Reed, and whilehe was being so joyfully successful with Kissenger andSpaniards i, 2, 3, and 4, carpenters came, and built twougly little houses in Camp Lazear. House No. 1 was thenastier of these two little houses. It was fourteen feet bytwenty, it had two doors cleverly arranged one back of theother so no mosquitoes could get into it, it had two win-dows looking south—they were on the same side as thedoor, so no draft could blow through that little house.Then it was furnished with a nice stove, to keep the tem-perature well above ninety, and there were tubs of water inthe house—to keep the air as chokey as the hold of a shipin the tropics. So you see it was an uninhabitable littlehouse—under the best of conditions—but now, on the thir-tieth of November in 1900, sweating soldiers carried severaltightly nailed suspicious-looking boxes, that came from the

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yellow fever wards of Las Animas—to make this housealtogether cursed. . . .

That night, of the thirtieth of November, Walter Reedand James Carroll were the witnesses of a miracle of brav-ery, for into this House No. i walked a young Americandoctor named Cooke, and two American soldiers, whosenames—where are their monuments?—were Folk and Jer-negan.

Those three men opened the tightly nailed, suspicious-looking boxes. They opened those boxes inside that house,m air already too sticky for proper breathing.

Phew! There were cursings, there were holdings ofnoses.

But they went on opening those boxes, and out of themCooke and Folk and Jcrnegan took pillows, soiled with theblack vomit of men dead of yellow fever; out of themthey took sheets and blankets, dirty with the discharges ofdying men past helping themselves. They beat those pil-lows and shook those sheets and blankets—“you must secthe yellow fever poison is well spread around that room!”Walter Reed had told them. Then Cooke and Folk andJerncgan made up their little army cots with those pillowsand blankets and sheets. They undressed. They lay downon those filthy beds. They tried to sleep—in that roomfouler than the dankest of medieval dungeons. . . . AndWalter Reed and James Carroll guarded that little house,so tenderly, to see no mosquito got into it, and Folk andCooke and Jerncgan had the very best of food, you may besure. . . .

Night after night those three lay in that house, wonder-ing perhaps about the welfare of the souls of their prede-cessors in those sheets and blankets. They lay there, won-dering whether anything else besides mosquitoes (thoughmosquitoes hadn’t even been proved to carry it then!) car-

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ricd yellow fever. . . . Then Walter Reed, who was amoral man and a thorough man, and James Carroll, whowas a grim man, came to make their test a little morethorough. More boxes came to them from Las Animas -and when Cooke and Jernegan and Folk unpacked them,they had to rush out of their little house, it was so dread-ful.

But they went back in, and they went to sleep. . . .

For twenty nights—where are their monuments?—thesethree men stayed there, and then they were quarantined ina nice airy tent, to wait for their attack of yellow fever.But they gained weight. They felt fit as fiddles. Theymade vast jokes about their dirty house and their periloussheets and blankets. They were happy as so many school-boys when they heard Kissenger and those Spaniards (i,2, 3, and 4) had really got the yellow jack after the mos-quito bites. What a marvelous proof, you will say, butwhat a dastardly experiment—but for the insanely scientificWalter Reed that most dastardly experiment was not mar-velous enough! Three more American boys went in there,and for twenty nights slept in new* unspeakable sheets andblankets—with this little refinement of the experiment: theyslept in the very pajamas in which yellow fever victims haddied. And then for twenty more nights three other Ameri-can lads went into House No. i, and slept that way—withthis additional little refinement of the experiment: theyslept on pillows covered with towels soaked with the bloodof men whom the yellow jack had killed.

But they all stayed fit as fiddles! Not a soul of these ninemen had so much as a touch of yellow fever! How won-derful is science, thought Walter Reed. “So,” he wrote,“the bubble of the belief that clothing can transmit yellowfever was pricked by the first touch of human experimen-tation.” Walter Reed was right. It is true, science is won-

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derful. Hut science is cruel, microbe hunting can be heart-less, and that relentless devil that was the experimenter inWalter Reed kept asking: “But is your experiment reallysound?” None of those men who slept in House No. i gotyellow fever, that is true—but how do you know theywere susceptible to yellow fever? Maybe they were natu-rally immune! Then Reed and Carroll, who had alreadyasked as much of Folk and Jernegan as any captain hasever asked of any soldier—so it was that Reed and Carrollnow shot virulent yellow fever blood under the skin ofJernegan, so it was they bit Folk with mosquitoes who hadfed on fatal cases of yellow fever. They both came downwith wracking pains and flushed faces and bloodshot eyes.They both came through their Valley of the Shadow.“Thank God,” murmured Reed—but especially WalterReed thanked God he had proved those two boys were notimmune during those twenty hot stinking nights in HouseNo. t.

For these deeds Warren Gladsden Jernegan and Levi E.Folk were generously rewarded with a purse of three hun-dred dollars—which in those days was a lot of money.

While these tests were going on John J. Moran, that ci-vilian clerk from Ohio, whom Walter Reed had paid thehonor of a salute, was a very disappointed man. He hadabsolutely refused to be paid; he had volunteered in “theinterest of science and for the cause of humanity,” he hadbeen bitten by those silver-striped Stegomyia mosquitoes(the bug experts just then thought this was the propername for that mosquito)—he had been stabbed severaltimes by several choice poisonous ones, but he hadn’t comedown with yellow fever, alas, he stayed fit as a fiddle.What to do with John J. Moran?

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“I have it!” said Walter Reed. “This to do with John J.Moran!”

So there was built, close by that detestable little HouseNo. i, another little house, called House No. 2. That wasa comfortable house! It had windows on the side oppositeto its door, so that a fine trade wind played through it. Itwas cool. It had a nice clean cot in it, with steam-disin-fected bedding. It would have been an excellent house fora consumptive to get better in. It was a thoroughly sani-tary little house. Half way across the inside of it was ascreen, from top to bottom, a fine-meshed screen that thetiniest mosquito found it impossible to fly through. At 12o’clock noon on the twenty-first of December in 1900, thisJohn J. Moran (who was a hog for these tests) “clad onlyin a nightshirt and fresh from a bath” walked into thishealthy little house. Five minutes before Reed and Carrollhad opened a glass jar in that room, and out of that jarflew fifteen she-mosquitoes, thirsty for blood, whining for ameal of blood, and each and every one of those fifteenmosquitoes, had fed, on various days before—on the bloodof yellow-faced boys in the hospital of Las Animas.

Clad only in a nightshirt and fresh from a bath, Moran—who knows of him now?—walked into the healthy littleroom and lay down on his clean cot. In a minute thatdamned buzzing started round his head, in two minutes hewas bitten, in the thirty minutes he lay there he wasstabbed seven times—without even the satisfaction ofsmashing those mosquitoes. You remember Mr. Sola,whom Grassi tortured—he probably had his worried mo-ments—but all Mr. Sola had to look forward to was alittle attack of malaria and a good dose of curative quinineto get him out of it. But Moran? But John J. Moran wasa hog for such tests! He was back there at four-thirty thesame afternoon, to be bitten again, and once more the next

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day—to satisfy the rest of the hungry she-mosquitoes whohadn’t found him the first day. In the other room of thishouse, with only a fine meshed but perfect wire screenbetween them and Moran—and the mosquitoes—lay twoother boys, and those two boys slept in that house safelyfor eighteen nights.

But Moran?

On Christmas morning of 1900, there was a fine presentwaiting for him—in his hnd, how that thumped—in hiseyes, how red they were md how the light hurt them—inhis bones, how tired they were I A nasty knock those mos-quitoes had hit him and he came within a hair of -dyingbut (thank God! murmured Walter Reed) he was saved,this Moran, to live the rest of his life in an obscurity hedidn’t deserve. So Moran had his wish—in the interest ofscience, and for humanity! So he, with Folk and Jerneganand Cooke and all those others proved that the dirty pesthole of a house (with no mosquitoes) was safe; and thatthe clean house (but with mosquitoes) was dangerous, sodangerous! So at last Walter Reed had every answer tohis diabolical questions, and he wrote, in that old-fashionedprose of his: “The essential factor in the infection of abuilding with yellow fever is the presence therein of mos-quitoes that have bitten cases of yellow fever.”

It was so simple. It was true. That was all. That wasthat. And Walter Reed wrote to his wife:

“The prayer that has been mine for twenty years, that Imight be permitted in some way or at some time to dosomething to alleviate human suffering has been granted!A thousand Happy New Years. . . . Hark, there go thetwenty-four buglers in concert, all sounding taps for theold yeail”

They were sounding taps, were those buglers, for thesearcher that was Jesse Lazear, and for the scourge of yel-

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low fever that could now be wiped from the earth. Theywere blowing their bugles, those musicians, to celebrate—asyou will see—the fate that waited for that little commis-sion after a too short hour of triumph. . .

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Then the world came to Habana, and there was acclaimfor Walter Reed, and the customary solemn discussionsand doubts and arguments of the learned men who came.William Crawford Gorgas (who was another blamelessman!) grooming himself for the immortality of Panama,went into the gutters and cesspools and cisterns of Habana,making horrid war on the Stegomyia mosquitoes, and inninety days, Habana had not a single case of yellow jack—she was free for the first time in two hundred years. Itwas magical! But still there came learned doctors, andsolemn bearded physicians, from Europe and America, ask-ing this, questioning that—and one morning fifteen of theseskeptics were in the mosquito room of the laboratory—oh!they were from Missouri! “These are remarkable experi-ments, but the results should be weighed and consideredwith reserve . . . et cetera!” Then the gauze lid came offa jar of she-mosquitoes (of course it was by accident) andinto the room, with wicked lustful eyes on those learnedscientists the Stegomyia buzzed. Alas for skepticism! Awaywent all doubts! From the room rushed the eminent serv-ants of knowledge! Down went the screen door with acrash—such was the vehemence of their conviction thatWalter Reed was right. (Though it happened that this par-ticular jar of mosquitoes was not contaminated.)

Then William Crawford Gorgas and John Guitcras—hewas a great Cuban authority on yellow jack—they wereconvinced too by those experiments at Camp Lazear, andthey were full of excellent plans to put those experiments

in practice—fine plans, but rash plans, alas. “It is remark-able,M said Gorgas and Guitcras, “that these experimentalcases at Camp Lazear didn’t die—they had typical yellowfever, but they got better, maybe because Reed put them tobed so quickly.” Then they proceeded to play with fire.“We will give newly arrived non-immune immigrants yel-low fever—a smart attack of it, but a safe attack of it.”They planned this, when it really was so easy to wipe outyellow fever simply by warring on the Stegomyia, whichdoes not breed in secret places, which is a very domesticmosquito! “And at the same time we can confirm Reed’sresults,” thought Gorgas and Guitcras.

The immigrants (of course they were very ignorant peo-ple) came; the immigrants listened and were told it wassafe; seven immigrants and a bold young American nursewere bitten by the poisoned Stegomyia. And of these eight,two immigrants and the bold young American nurse wentout from the hospital, safe from another attack of yellowfever, safe from all the worries of the world. . . . Theywent out, feet first—to slow music. What a fine searcherwas Walter Reed—but what amazing luck he had, in thoseexperiments at Camp Lazear. . . .

There was panic in Habana, and mutterings of the mob—and who can blame that mob, for human life is sacred.But there was Assistant Surgeon James Carroll, unsenti-mental as an cmbalmer and before all else a soldier,—hehad just then come back to Habana to settle certain littleacademic questions. “We can wipe out yellow fever now,we have proved just how it gets from man to man—butwhat is it causes yellow fever?” This is what Reed andCarroll asked each other, and everybody must admit thatit was a purely academic question, and I ask you: was itworth a human life (even of a Spanish immigrant) to findthe answer? Myself I cannot answer yes or no. But Reed

and Carroii answered yes! Starting out as soldiers obeyingorders, as humanitarians risking their hides to save the livesof men, they had been bitten by the virus of the search fortruth, cold truth—they were enchanted with the glory thatcomes from the discovery of unknown things. . . .

They were sure there was no visible bacillus, nor anykind of microbe that could be seen through the strongestmicroscope to cause it—they had looked in the livers ofmen and the lights of mosquitoes for such a germ, in vain.But there were other possibilities—magical possibilities, of anew kind of germ that might be the cause of yellow fever,an ultra-microbe, too immensely small for the strongestlens to uncover, revealing its existence only by the murder-ing of men with its unseen mysterious poison. That mightbe the nature of the germ of yellow fever. Old FriedrichLoefHer—he of the mustaches—had found such little lifemaking calves sick with foot-and-mouth disease. And nowif Reed and Carroll could show the microbe of yellowfever belonged to this sub-microscopic world too!

Walter Reed was busy, so he sent James Carroll to Ha-bana to see, and here you find James Carroll, intensely an-noyed because those experimental cases of Guiteras haddied. Guiteras—do you blame him?—was in a funk. No,Carroll mightn’t draw blood from yellow fever patients.Indeed not, Carroll mightn’t even bite them with mosqui-toes. What was most silly, Dr. Guiteras would rather nothave Dr. Carroll make post-mortems on the dead cases—itmight enrage the population of Habana. “You can imaginemy disappointment!” wrote Carroll to Walter Reed, withindignant remarks about the frivolous fears of ignorantpopulations. But did those deaths stop him? Not Carroll!

By some unexplained sorceries he got hold of some goodpoisonous yellow fever blood, and filtered it through aporcelain filter that was so fine no visible microbe could

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get through it. The stuff that came through that filterCarroll shot under the skin of three non-immunes (historydoesn’t tell how he induced them to stand for it)—andpresto! two of them got yellow fever. Hurrah! Yellowfever was like foot-and-mouth disease then. Its cause was agerm maybe too little to see, a microbe that could sneakthrough fine-grained porcelain.*

Reed wrote to stop him: those deaths were too much—but Carroll simply must get some contaminated mosqui-toes, and by some bold devilry he did get them, andheigho for this final most horrible experiment!

“In my own case,” said Carroll, “produced by the bite ofa single mosquito, a fatal result was looked for during sev-eral days. I became so firmly convinced that the severity ofthe attack depended upon the susceptibility of an individualrather than on the number of bites he had got, that onOctober 9, 1901, at Habana, I purposely applied to a non-immune eight mosquitoes (all l had) that had been con-taminated eighteen days before. The attac\ that followedwas a mild one ” ended Carroll, triumphantly. But what ifthat patient had died—as God knows he might have?

Such was the strangest of that strange crew, and lookingback on this his boldness, in despite of his fanatic pryinginto dangerous mysteries, my hat is off to this bald-headedbe-spectacled ex-lumberjack searcher. He himself was thefirst to be hit, it was Carroll gave the example to thoseAmerican soldiers, to that civilian clerk, and to those Span-ish immigrants—1, 2, 3, and 4—and to all the rest of theunknown numbers of them. And do you remember, inthe middle of his attack of yellow fever, that momentwhen his heart seemed to stop? In 1907, six years after,Carroll’s heart stopped for good. . . .

• A spiral-shaped microbe has recently been brought forward as thecause of yellow fever, but this discovery has not yet been confirmed.

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VII

And in 1902, five years before that, Walter Reed, in theprime of his life, but tired, so tired, died—just as the ap-plause of nations grew thunderous—of appendicitis. “I amleaving my wife and daughter so little . . said WalterReed to his friend Kean, just before the ether cone wentdown over his face. “So little . . he mumbled as theether let him down into his last dreams. Rut let us beproud of our nation, and proud of our Congress—for theyvoted Mrs. Emilie Laurence Reed, wife of the man whohas saved the world no one knows what millions of dollars—let us say nothing of lives—they voted her a handsomepension, of fifteen hundred dollars a year! And the samefor the widow of Lazcar, and the same for the widow ofJames Carroll—and surely that was handsome for them,because, as one committee of senators quaintly said: “Theycan still help themselves.”

But what of Private Kissenger, of Ohio, who stood thattest, in the interest of science—and for humanity? Hedidn’t die from yellow fever. And they prevailed uponhim, at last, to accept one hundred and fifteen dollars anda gold watch, which was presented to him in the presenceof the officers and men of Columbia barracks. He didn’tdie—but what was worse, as the yellow fever germs wentout of him, a paralysis crept into him—now he sits, count-ing the hours on his gold watch. But what luck! At thelast account he had a good wife to support him by takingin washing.

And what of the others? Time is too short to deal withthose others—and besides I do not know what has becomeof them. So it is that this strange crew has made rendez-vous, each one with his special and particular fate—thisstrange crew who put the capstone on that mos/ marvelous

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ten years of the microbe hunters, that crew who workedtogether so that now, in 1926, there is hardly enough ofthe poison of yellow fever left in the world to put on thepoints of six pins. . . .

So it is that the good death-fighter, David Bruce, shouldeat his words: “It is impossible, at present, to experimentwith human beings.”

CITATTER XII

PAUL EHRLICHThe Magic Bullet

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Antony Leeuwenhoek,who was a matter-of-fact man, looked through a magiceye, saw microbes, and so began this history. He wouldcertainly have snorted a contemptuous Dutch sort of snortat anybody who called his microscope a magic eye.

Now Paul Ehrlich—who brings this history to the happyend necessary to all serious histories—was a gay man. Hesmoked twenty-five cigars a day; he was fond of drinkinga seidel of beer (publicly) with his old laboratory servantand many seidels of beer with German, English andAmerican colleagues; a modern man, there was still some-thing medieval about him for he said: “We must learn toshoot microbes with magic bullets.” He was laughed atfor saying that, and his enemies cartooned him under thename “Doktor Phantasus.”

But he did make a magic bullet! Alchemist that he was,he did something more outlandish than that, for hechanged a drug that is the favorite poison of murderersinto a saver of the lives of men. Out of arsenic he con-

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cocted a deliverer from the scourge of that pale corkscrewmicrobe whose attack is the reward of sin, whose bite isthe cause of syphilis, the ill of the loathsome name. PaulEhrlich had a most weird and wrong-headed and unscien-tific imagination: that helped him to make microbe hunt-ers turn another corner, though alas, there have been fewof them who have known what to do when they gotaround that corner, which is why this history has to stopwith Paul Ehrlich.

Of course, it is sure as the sun following the dawn of to-morrow, that the high deeds of the microbe hunters havenot come to an end; there will be others to fashion magicbullets. And they will be waggish men and original, likePaul Ehrlich, for it is not from a mere combination of in-cessant work and magnificent laboratories that such mar-velous cures are to be got. . . . To-day? Well, to-day thereare no microbe hunters who look you solemnly in the eyeand tell you that two plus two makes five. Paul Ehrlichwas that kind of a man. Born in March of 1854 in Silesiain Germany, he went to the gymnasium at Breslau, and histeacher of literature ordered him to write an essay, subject:“Life is a Dream.”

“Life rests on normal oxidations,” wrote that brightyoung Jew, Paul Ehrlich. “Dreams are an activity of thebrain and the activities of the brain are only oxidations . . .dreams are a sort of phosphorescence of the brain!”

He got a bad mark for such smartness, but then he wasalways getting bad marks. Out of the gymnasium, he wentto a medical school, or rather, to three or four medicalschools—Ehrlich was that kind of a medical student. Itwas the opinion of the distinguished medical faculties ofBreslau and Strasbourg and Freiburg and Leipsic that hewas no ordinary student. It was also their opinion he wasan abominably bad student, which meant that Paul Ehrlich

lefused to memorize the ten thousand and fifty long wordssupposed to be needed for the cure of sick patients. He wasa revolutionist, he was part of the revolt led by that chem-ist, Louis Pasteur, and the country doctor, Robert Koch.His professors told Paul Ehrlich to cut up dead bodies andlearn the parts of dead bodies; instead he cut up one partof a dead body into very thin slices and set to work topaint these slices with an amazing variety of pretty-coloredaniline dyes, bought, borrowed, stolen from under his dem-onstrator’s nose.

He hadn’t a notion of why he liked to do that—thoughthere is no doubt that to the end of his days this man’schief joy (aside from wild scientific discussions over thebeer tables) was in looking at brilliant colors, and makingthem.

“Ho, Paul Ehrlich—what are you doing there?” askedone of his professors, Waldeycr.

“Ja, Herr Professor, I am trying with different dyes!”

He hated classical training, he called himself a modern,but he had a fine knowledge of Latin, and with this Latinhe used to coin his battle cries. For he worked by meansof battle cries and slogans rather than logic. “Corpora ?ionigunt nisi fixata!” he would shout, pounding the table tillthe dishes danced—“Bodies do not act unless fixed!” Thatphrase heartened him through thirty years of failure. “Yousee! You understand! You know!” he would say, wavinghis horn-rimmed spectacles in your face, and if you tookhim seriously you might think that Latin rigmarole (andnot his searcher’s brain) carried him to his final triumph.And in a way there is no doubt it did!

Paul Ehrlich was ten years younger than Robert Koch;he was in Cohnheim’s laboratory on that day of Koch’sfirst demonstration of the anthrax microbe; he was atheisti-cal, so he needed some human god and that god was Rob-

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ert Koch. Painting ®a sick liver Ehrlich had seen the tu-bercle germ before ever Koch laid eyes on it. Ignorant,lacking Koch’s clear intelligence, he supposed those littlecolored rods were crystals. But when he sat that eveningin the room in Berlin in March, iStt2, and listened to.Koch’s proof of the discovery of the cause of consumption,he saw the light: “It was the most gripping experience ofmy scientific life,” said Paul Ehrlich, long afterwards. Sohe went to Koch. He must hunt microbes too! He showedRobert Koch an ingenious way to stain that tubercle mi-crobe—that trick is used, hardly changed, to this day. Hewould hunt microbes! And in the enthusiastic way he hadhe proceeded to get consumption germs all over himself:so he caught consumption and had to go to Egypt.

Ehrlich was thirty-four years old then, and if he haddied in Egypt, he would certainly have been forgotten, orbeen spoken of as a color-loving, gay, visionary failure. Hehad the energy of a dynamo; he had believed you couldtreat sick people and hunt microbes at the same time; hehad been head physician in a famous clinic in Berlin, buthe was a very raw-nerved man and was fidgety under thecries of sufferers past helping and the deaths of patientswho could not be cured. To cure them! Not by guess orby the bedside manner or by the laying on of hands or bywaiting for Nature to do it—but how to cure them! Thesethoughts made him a bad doctor, because doctors shouldbe sympathetic but not desperate about ills over which theyare powerless. Then, too, Paul Ehrlich was a disgustingdoctor because his brain was in the grip of dreams: helooked at the bodies of his patients: he seemed to seethrough their skins: his eyes became super-microscopes thatsaw the quivering stuff of the cells of these bodies as noth-

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ing more than complicated chemical* formulas. Why ofcourse! Living human stuff was only a business of benzenerings and side-chains, just like his dyes! So Paul Ehrlich(caring nothing for the latest physiological theories) in-vented a weird old-fashioned life-chemistry of his own; soPaul Ehrlich was anything but a Great Healer; so hewould have been a failure But he didn’t die!

“I will stain live animals!” he cried. “The chemistry ofanimals is like the chemistry of my dyes—staining themwhile they are still alive—that will tell me all aboutthem!” So he took his favorite dye, which was methyleneblue, and shot a little of it into the ear vein of a rabbit.He watched the color flow through the blood and body ofthe beast and mysteriously pick out and paint the livingendings of its nerves blue—but no other part of it! Howstrange! He forgot all about his fundamental science for amoment. “Maybe methylene blue will kill pain then,” hemuttered, and he straightway injected this blue stuff intogroaning patients, and maybe they were eased a little, butthere were difficulties, of a more or less entertaining nature,which maybe frightened the patients—who can blamethem ?

He failed to invent a good pain-killer, but from thisstrange business of methylene blue pouncing on just onetissue out of all the hundred different kinds of stuff thatliving things are made of, Paul Ehrlich invented a fantasticidea which led him at last to his magic bullet.

“Here is a dye,” he dreamed, “to stain only one tissueout of all the tissues of an animal’s body—there must beone to hit no tissue of men, but to stain and kill the mi-crobes that attack men.” For fifteen years and more hedreamed that, before ever he had a chance to try it. . . .

In 1890 Ehrlich came back from Egypt; he had not diedfrom tuberculosis; Robert Koch shot his terrible cure for

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consumption into him, still he did not die from tuberculo-sis—and presently he went to work in the Institute of Rob-ert Koch in Berlin, in those momentous days when Beh-ring was massacring guinea-pigs to save babies from diph-theria and the Japanese Kitasato was doing miraculousthings to mice with lockjaw. Ehrlich was the life of thatgiave place! Koch would come into his pupils crammedand topsy-turvy laboratory, that gleamed and shimmeredwith rows of bottles of dyes Ehrlich had not time to use—for you may be sure Koch was Tsar in that house andthought Ehrlich’s dreams of magic bullets were nonsense.Robert Koch would come in and say:

“Ja, my dear Ehrlich, what do your experiments tell usto-day?”

Then would come a geyser of excited explanations fromPaul Ehrlich, who was prying then into the way mice maybecome immune to those poisons of the beans called thecastor and the jequirity:

“You see, I can measure exactly—it is always the same!—the amount of poison to kill in forty-eight hours a mouseweighing ten grams. ... You know, I can now plot acurve of the way the immunity of my mice increases—it isas exact as experiments in the science of physics. . . . Youunderstand, I have found how it is this poison kills mymice; it clots his blood corpuscles inside his arteries! Thatis the whole explanation of it . . and Paul Ehrlichwaved test-tubes filled with brick-red clotted clumps ofmouse blood at his famous chief, proving to him that theamount of poison to clot that blood was just the amountthat would kill the mouse that the blood came from. Tor-rents of figures and experiment Paul Ehrlich poured overRobert Koch

“But wait a moment, my dear Ehrlich! I can’t followyou—please explain more clearly!”

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“Certainly, Herr Doktor! That I can do right off!’’Never for a moment does Ehrlich stop talking, but grabs apiece of chalk, gets down on his knees, and scrawls hugediagrams of his ideas over the laboratory floor—“Now, doyou see, is that clear?”

There was no dignity about Paul Ehrlich! Neither abouthis attitudes, for he would draw pictures of his theoriesanywhere, with no more sense of propriety than an annoy-ing little boy, on his cuffs and the bottoms of shoes, on hisown shirt front to the distress of his wife, and on the shirtfronts of his colleagues if they did not dodge fast enough.Nor could you properly say Paul Ehrlich was dignifiedabout his thoughts, because, twenty-four hours a day hewas having the most outrageous thoughts of why we areimmune or how to measure immunity or how a dye couldbe turned into a magic bullet. He left a trail of fantasticpictures of those thoughts behind him everywhere!

Just the same he was the most exact of men in his ex-periments. He was the first to cry out against the messyways of microbe hunters, who searched for truth by pour-ing a little of this into some of that, and in that laboratoryof Robert Koch he murdered fifty white mice where onewas killed before, trying to dig up simple laws, to be ex-pressed in numbers, that he felt lay beneath the enigmas ofimmunity and life and death. And that exactness, thoughit did nothing to answer those riddles, helped him at lastto make the magic bullet.

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Such was the gayety of Paul Ehrlich, and such his mod-esty—for he was always making straight-faced jokes at hisown ridiculousness—that he easily won friends, and he wasa crafty man too and saw to it that certain of these friendswere men in high places. Presently., in 1896, he was direc-

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tor of a laboratory of his own; it was called the RoyalPrussian Institute for Serum Testing. It was at Steglitz,near Berlin, and it had one little room that had been abakery and another little room that had been a stable. “Itis because we are not exact that we fail!” cried Ehrlich,remembering the bubble of the vaccines of Pasteur whichhad burst, and the balloon of the scrums of Behring whichhad been pricked. “There must be mathematical laws togovern the doings of these poisons and vaccines and anti-toxins!” he insisted, so this man with the erratic imagina-tion walked up and down in those two dark rooms, smok-ing, explaining, expostulating, and measuring as accuratelyas God would let him with drops of poison broth and cali-brated tubes of healing serum.

But laws? He would make an experiment. It wouldturn out beautifully. “You see! here is the reason of it!”he would say, and draw a queer picture of what a toxinmust look like and what the chemistry of a body cell mustlook like, but as he went on working, as regiments ofguinea-pigs marched to their doom, Paul Ehrlich foundmore exceptions to his simple theories than agreementswith them. That didn’t bother him, for, such was his im-agination, that he invented new little supporting laws totake care of the exceptions, he drew stranger and strangerpictures, until his famous “Side-Chain” theory of immunitybecame a crazy puzzle, which could explain hardly any-thing, which could predict nothing at all. To his dyingday Paul Ehrlich believed in his silly side-chain theory ofimmunity; from all parts of the world critics knocked thattheory to smithereens—but he never gave it up; when hecouldn’t find experiments to destroy his critics he argued atthem with enormous hair-splittings like Duns Scotus andSt. Thomas Aquinas. When he was beaten in these argu-ments at medical congresses it was his custom to curse—

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gayiv—at his antagonist all the way home. “You see, mydear colleague!” he would cry, “that man is a SHAME-LESS BADGER!” Every few minutes, at the top of hisvoice he yelled this, defying the indignant conductor toput him off the train.

So, in 1899, when he was forty-five, if he had died then,Ehrlich would certainly still have been called a failure. Hisefforts to find laws for serums had resulted in a collectionof fantastic pictures that nobody took very seriously, theycertainly had done nothing to turn feebly curative serumsinto powerful ones—what to do? First, this to do, thoughtEhrlich, and he pulled his wires and cajoled his influentialfriends, and presently the indispensable and estimable Mr.Kadereit, his chief cook and bottle-washer, was dismount-ing that laboratory at Steglitz—they were moving toFrank for t-on-the-Main, away from the vast medical schoolsand scientific buzzings of Berlin. What to do? Well,Frankfort was near those factories where the master-chem-ists turned out their endless bouquets of pretty colors—what could be more important for Paul Ehrlich? Thenthere were rich Jews in Frankfort, and these rich Jewswere famous for their public spirit, and money—Geld, thatwas one of his four big “G’s,” along with Geduld—pa-tience, Geschic\—cleverness and Gluc\—luck, which Ehr-lich always said were needed to find the magic bullet. SoPaul Ehrlich came to Frankfort-on-the-Main, or rather,“WE came to Frankfort-on-the-Main,” said the valuableMr. Kadereit, who had the very devil of a time moving allof those dyes and that litter of be-pencilcd and dog-earedchemical journals.

Reading this history, you might think there was only onegood kind of microbe hunter: the kind of searcher whostood on his own absolutely, who paid little attention tothe work of other microbe hunters, who read nature and

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not books. But Paul Ehrlich was not that kind of man!He rarely observed nature, unless it was the pet toad in hisgarden, whose activities helped Ehrlich to prophesy theweather—it was Mr. Kadereit’s first duty to bring plenty offlies to that toad. . . . No, Paul Ehrlich got his ideas out ofbooks.

He lived among scientific books and subscribed to everychemical journal in every language he could read, and inseveral he couldn’t read. Books littered his laboratory sothat when visitors came and Ehrlich said: “I beg you, beseated I” there was no place for them to sit at all. Journalsstuck out of the pockets of his overcoat—when he remem-bered to wear one—and the maid, bringing his coffee inthe morning, fell over ever-growing mountains of books inhis bedroom. Books, with the help of those expensive ci-gars, kept Paul Ehrlich poor. Mice built nests in the vastpiles of books on the old sofa in his office. When he wasn’tpainting the insides of his animals and the outside of him-self with his dyes, he was peering in these books. Andwhat was important inside of those books, was in the brainof Paul Ehrlich, ripening, changing itself into those out-landish ideas of his, waiting to be used. That was wherePaul Ehrlich got his ideas—you would never accuse him ofstealing the ideas of others!—and queer things happened tothose ideas of others when they stewed in Ehrlich’s brain.

So now, in 1901, at the beginning of his eight-year searchfor the magic bullet he read of the researches of AlphonseLaveran. Laveran was the man, you remember, who dis-covered the malaria microbe, and very lately Laveran hadtaken to fussing with trypanosomes. He had shot thosefinned devils, which do evil things to the hind-quarters ofhorses and give them a disease called the mal de Caderas,into mice. Laveran had watched those trypanosomes killthose mice, one hundred times out of one hundred. Then

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Lavcran had injected arsenic under the skins of some ofthose suffering mice. That had helped them a little, anckilled many of the trypanosomes that gnawed at them, bunot one of these mice ever got really better; one hundretout of one hundred died and that was as far as Alphons*Laveran ever got.

But reading this was enough to get Ehrlich started“Hoi here is an excellent microbe to work with I It jlarge and easy to see. It is easy to grow in mice. It kihthem with the most beautiful regularity! It always kil amice! What could be a better microbe than this trypanosome to use to try to find a magic bullet to cure? Because,if I could find a dye that would save, completely save, justone mouse!”

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So Paul Ehrlich, in 1902, set out on his hunt. He gotout his entire array of gleaming and glittering and shim-mering dyes. “Splen-did!” he cried as he squatted beforecupboards holding an astounding mosaic of sloppy bottles.He provided himself with plenty of the healthiest mice. Hegot himself a most earnest and diligent Japanese doctor,Shiga, to do the patient job of watching those mice, ofsnipping a bit off the ends of their tails to get a drop ofblood to look for the trypanosomes, of snipping another bitoff the ends of the same tails to get a drop of blood to in-ject into the next mouse—to do the job, in short, that ittakes the industry and patience of a Japanese to do. Theevil trypanosomes of the mal de Caderas came in a doomedguinea-pig from the Pasteur Institute in Paris; into thefirst mouse they went, and the hunt was on.

They tried nearly five hundred dyesl What a completelyunscientific hunter Paul Ehrlich was! It was like the firstboatman hunting for the right kind of wood from which

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to make stout oars; it was like primitive blacksmiths claw-ing among metals for the best stuff from which to forgeswords. It was, in short, the oldest of all the ways of manto get knowledge. It was the method of Trial and Sweat-ing! Ehrlich tried; Shiga sweat. Their mice turned bluefrom this dye and yellow from that one, but the beastlyfinned trypanosomes of the mal de Caderas swarmed gaylyn their veins, and killed those mice, one hundred out of"very hundred!

That man Ehrlich smoked more of his imported cigars,even at night in bed he would awake to smoke them; he.drank more mineral water; he read in more books, and hethrew books at the head of poor Kadercit—who heavenknows could not be blamed for not knowing what dyewould kill trypanosomes. He said Latin phrases; he pro-pounded amazing theories of what these dyes ought to do.Never had any searcher coined so many utterly wrong the-ories. But then, in 1903, came a day when one of thesewrong explanations came to help him.

Ehrlich was testing the pretty-colored but complicatedbenzo-purpurin dyes on dying mice, but the mice were dy-ing, with sickening regularity, from the mal de Caderas.Paul Ehrlich wrinkled his forehead—already it was like acorrugated iron roof from the perplexities and failures oftwenty years—and he told Shiga:

“These dyes do not spread enough through the mouse’sbody! Maybe, my dear Shiga, if we change it a little—maybe, let us say, if we added sulfo-groups to this dye, itwould dissolve better in the blood of the mouse!” PaulEhrlich wrinkled his brow.

Now, while Paul Ehrlich’s head was an encyclopedia ofchemical knowledge, his hands were not the hands of anexpert chemist. He hated complicated apparatus as muchas he loved complicated theories. He didn’t know how to

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manage apparatus. He was only a chemical dabbler making1endless fussy little starts with test-tubes, dumping in firstthis and then that to change the color of a dye, rushingout of his room to show the first person he met the result,waving the test-tube at him, shouting: “You understand?This is splen-did!” But as for delicate syntheses, those sub-tle buildings-up and changings of dyes, that was work forthe master chemists. “But we must change this dye a lit-tle—then it will work!” he cried. Now Paul Ehrlich wasa gay man and a most charming one, and presently backfrom the dye factory near by came that benzopurpurincolor, with the sulfo-groups properly stuck onto it,“changed a little.”

Under the skin of two white mice Shiga shot the eviltrypanosomes of the mal de Caderas. A day passes. Twodays go by. The eyes of those mice begin to stick shutwith the mucilage of doom, their hair stands up straightwith their dread of destruction—one day more and it willbe all over with both of those mice. . . . But wait! Underthe skin of one of those two mice Shiga sends a shot ofthat red dye—changed a little. Ehrlich watches, paces,mutters, gesticulates, shoots his cuffs. In a few minutes theears of that mouse turn red, the whites of his nearly shuteyes turn pinker than the pink of his albino pupils. Thatday is a day of fate for Paul Ehrlich, it is the day the godof chance is good, for, like snows before the sun of April,so those fell trypanosomes melt out of the blood of thatmouse!

Away they go, shot down by the magic bullet, till thelast one has perished. And the mouse ? His eyes open. Hesnouts in the shavings in the bottom of his cage and sniffsat the pitiful little body of his dead companion, the un-treated one.

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He is the first one of all mice to fail to die from the at-tack of the trypanosome.

Paul Ehrlich, by the grace of persistence, chance, God,and a dye called “Trypan Red” (its real chemical namewould stretch across this page!) has saved him! How thatencouraged this already too courageous man! “I have adye to cure a mouse—I shall find one to save a millionmen,” so dreamed that confident German Jew.

But not at once, alas and alas. With gruesome diligenceShiga shot in that trypan red, and some mice got betterbut others got worse. One, seeming to be cured, wouldfrisk about its cage, and then, after sixty days (!) wouldturn up seedy in the morning. Snip! went an end off itstail, and the skillful Shiga would call Paul Ehrlich to seeits blood matted with a writhing swarm of the fell trypanosomes of the mal de Cadcras. Terrible beasts are tryp-anosomes, sly, tough, as all despicable microbes are tough.And among the tough lot of them there are super-hard)ones. These beasts, when a Jew and a Japanese come alongto have at them with a bright-colored dye, lap up that dye.They like it! Or they retreat discreetly to some out-of-the-way place in a mouse’s carcass. There they wait their timeto multiply in swarms. . . •

So, for his first little success, Paul Ehrlich paid with athousand disappointments. The trypanosome of DavidBruce’s nagana and the deadly trypanosome of humansleeping sickness laughed at that trypan red! They abso-lutely refused to be touched by it! Then, what worked sobeautifully with mice, failed completely when they came totry it on white rats and guinea-pigs and dogs. It was agrinding work, to be tackled only by such an impatientpersistent man as Ehrlich, for had he not saved onemouse?—What waste! He used thousands of animals I I

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used to think, in the arrogance of my faith in science:“What waste!” But no. Or call it waste if you like, re-membering that nature gets her most sublime results—sooften—by being lavishly wasteful. And then rememberthat Paul Ehrlich had learned one lesson: change an appar-ently useless dye, a little, and it turns from a merely prettycolor into something of a cure. That was enough to driveforward this too confident man.

All the time the laboratory was growing. To the goodpeople of Frankfort Paul Ehrlich was a savant who under-stood all mysteries, who probed all the riddles of nature,who forgot everything. And how the people of Frankfortloved him for being so forgetful! It was said that thisHerr Professor Doktor Ehrlich had to write himself postalcards several days ahead to remind himself of festive eventsin his family. “What a human being!” they said. “What adeep thinker!” said the cabbies who drove him everymorning to his Institute. “That must be a genius!” saidthe grind-organ musicians whom he tipped heavily once aweek to play dance music in the garden by the laboratory.“My best ideas come when I hear gay music like that,”said Paul Ehrlich, who detested all highbrow music andliterature and art. “What a democratic man, seeing howgreat he is!” said the good people of Frankfort, and theynamed a street after him. Before he was old he was legen-dary!

Then the rich people worshiped him. A great stroke ofluck came in 1906. Mrs. Franziska Speyer, the widow ofthe rich banker, Georg Speyer, gave him a great sum ofmoney to build the Georg Speyer House, to buy glasswareand mice and expert chemists, who could put together themost complicated of his darling dyes with a twist of thewrist, who could make even the crazy drugs that Ehrlichinvented on paper. Without this Mrs. Franziska Speyer,

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Paul Ehrlich might very well never have molded thosemagic bullets, for that was a job—you can watch what ajob!—for a factory full of searchers. Here in this newSpeyer House Ehrlich lorded it over chemists and microbehunters like the president of a company that turned out athousand automobiles a day. But he was really old-fash-ioned, and never pressed buttons. He was always poppinginto one or another of the laboratories every conceivabletime of the day, scolding his slaves, patting them on theback, telling them of howling blunders he himself hadmade, laughing when he was told that his own assistantssaid he was crazy. He was everywhere! But there was al-ways one way of tracking him down, for ever and againhis voice could be heard, bawling down the corridors:

“Ka-de-reit! . . . Ci-gars!” or “Ka-de-reit! . . . Min-er-alwa-ter!”

The dyes were a great disappointment. The chemistsmuttered he was an idiot. But then, you must rememberPaul Ehrlich read books. One day, sitting in the one chairin his office that wasn’t piled high with them, peeringthrough chemical journals like some Rosicrucian in searchof the formula for the philosopher’s stone, he came across awicked drug. It was called “Atoxyl” which means: “Notpoisonous.” Not poisonous? Atoxyl had almost cured micewith sleeping sickness. Atoxyl had killed mice withoutsleeping sickness. Atoxyl had been tried on those poordarkies down in Africa. It had not cured them, but analtogether embarrassing number of those darkies had goneblind, stone blind, from Atoxyl before they had had timeto die from sleeping sickness. So, you see, this Atoxylwas a sinister medicine that its inventors—had they beenliving—should have been ashamed of. It was made of a

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benzene ring, which is nothing more than six atoms of car-bon chasing themselves round in a circle like a dog run-ning round biting the ^nd of his tail, and four atoms ofhydrogen, and some ammonia and the oxide of arsenic—which everybody knows is poisonous.

“We will change it a little,” said Paul Ehrlich, thoughhe knew the chemists who had invented Atoxyl had saidit was so built that it couldn’t be changed without spoilingit. But every afternoon Ehrlich fussed around alone in hischemical laboratory, which was like no other chemical lab-oratory in the world. It had no retorts, no beakers, noflasks nor thermometers nor ovens—no, not even a balance!It was crude as the prescription counter of the countrydruggist (who also runs the postoffice) excepting that inits middle stood a huge table, with ranks and ranks ofbottles—bottles with labels and bottles without, bottleswith scrawled unreadable labels and bottles whose purplecontents had slopped all over the labels. But that man’smemory remembered what was in every one of those bot-tles! From the middle of this jungle of bottles a singleBunsen burner reared its head and spouted a blue flame.What chemist would not laugh at this laboratory?

Here Paul Ehrlich dabbled with Atoxyl, shouting:“Splen-did!”, growling: “Un-be-liev-a-ble!”, dictating to thelong-suffering Miss Marquardt, bawling for the indispen-sable Kadereit. In that laboratory, with a chemical cun-ning the gods sometimes bestow on searchers who couldnever be chemists, Paul Ehrlich found that you canchange Atoxyl, not a little but a lot, that it can be builtinto heaven knows how many entirely unheard-of com-pounds of arsenic, without spoiling the combination ofbenzene and arsenic at all!

“I can change Atoxyl!” Without his hat or coat Ehrlichhurried out of this dingy room to the marvelous workshop

3*2

of Bertheim, chief of his chemist slaves. “Atoxyl can bechanged—maybe we can change it into a hundred, ath&usand new compounds of arsenic!” he exclaimed. . . •“Now, my dear Bertheim,” and he poured out a thousandfantastic schemes. Bertheim? He could not resist that“Now my dear Bertheim!”

For the next two years the whole staff, Japs and Ger-mans, not to mention some Jews, men and white rats andwhite mice, not to mention Miss Marquardt and MissLeupold—and don’t forget Kadereit!—toiled together inthat laboratory which was like a subterranean forge ofimps and gnomes. They tried this, they did that, with sixhundred and six—that is their exact number—differentcompounds of arsenic. Such was the power of the chiefimp over them, that this staff never stopped to think ofthe absurdity and the impossibility of their job, which wasthis: to turn arsenic from a pet weapon of murderers intoa cure which no one was sure could exist for a diseaseEhrlich hadn’t even dreamed might be cured. These slavesworked as only men can work when they are inspired bya wrinkle-browed fanatic with kind gray eyes.

They changed Atoxyl! They developed marvelous com-pounds of arsenic which—hurrah!—would really cure mice.“We have it!” the staff would be ready to shout, but then,worse luck, when the fell trypanosomes of the mal deCaderas had gone, those marvelous cures turned the bloodof the cured mice to water, or killed them with a fataljaundice. . . . And—who would believe it?—some of thosearsenic remedies made mice dance, not for a minute but forthe rest of their lives round and round they whirled, upand down they jumped. Satan himself could not haveschemed a worse torture for creatures just saved fromdeath. It seemed ridiculous, hopeless, to try to find a per-fect cure. But Paul Ehrlich? He wrote:

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“It is very interesting that the only damage to the miceis that they become dancing mice. Those who visit my lab-oratory must be impressed by the great number of danc-ing mice it entertains. . . .” He was a sanguine man!

They invented countless compounds, and it was a businessfor despair. There was that strange affair of the arsenicfastness. When Ehrlich found that one big dose of a com-pound was too dangerous for his beasts, he tried to curethem by giving them a lot of little doses. But, curse it!The trypanosomes became immune to the arsenic, and re-fused to be killed off at all, and the mice died in droves. . . .

Such was the grim procession through the first five hun-dred and ninety-one compounds of arsenic. Paul Ehrlichkept cheering himself by telling-himself fairy stories of mar-velous new cures, stories that God and all nature couldprove were lies. He drew absurd diagrams for Bertheimand the staff, pictures of imaginary arsenical remedies thatthey in their expert wisdom knew it was impossible tomake. Everywhere he made pictures for his boys—whoknew more than he did—on innumerable reams of paper,on the menu cards of restaurants and on picture post cardsin beer halls. His men were aghast at his neglect of theimpossible; they were encouraged by his indomitable mul-ishness. They said: “He is so enthusiastic!” and became en-thusiastic with him. So, burning his candle at both ends?Paul Ehrlich came, in 1909, to his day of days.

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Burning his candle at both ends, for he was past fiftyand his time was short, Paul Ehrlich stumbled onto the fa-mous preparation 606—though you understand he couldnever have found it without the aid of that expert, Ber-theim. Product of the most subtle chemical synthesis wasthis 606, dangerous to make because of the peril of explo-

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sions and fire from those constantly present ether vapors,and so hard to keep—the least trace of air changed it froma* mild stuff to a terrible poison.

That was the celebrated preparation 606, and it rejoicedin the name: “Dioxy-diamino-arsenobcnzol-dihydro-chlor-idc.” Its deadly effect on trypanosomes was as great as itsname was long. At a swoop one shot of it cleaned thosefell trypanosomes of the mal de Caderas out of the bloodof a mouse—a wee bit of it cleaned them out without leav-ing a single one to carry news or tell the story. And it wassafe! So safe—though it was heavily charged with arsenic,that pet poison of murderers. It never made mice blind, itnever turned their blood to water, they never danced—itwas safe!

“Those were the days!” muttered old Kadercit, longafter. Already in those days he was growing stiff, but howhe stumped about taking care of the “Father.” “Thosewere the days, when we discovered the 606!” And theywere the days—for what more hectic days (always except-ing the days of Pasteur) in the whole history of microbehunting? 606 was safe, 606 would cure the mal de Cade-ras, which was nice for mice and the hindquarters ofhorses, but what next? Next was that Paul Ehrlich madea lucky stab, that came from reading a theory with notruth in it. First Paul Ehrlich read—it had happened in1906—of the discovery by the German zoologist, Schaudinn,of a thin pale spiral-shaped microbe that looked like acorkscrew without a handle. (It was a fine discovery andFritz Schaudinn was a fantastic fellow, who drank and sawweird visions. I wish I could tell you more of him.) Schau-dinn spied out this pale microbe looking like a corkscrewwithout a handle. He named it the Spirocheta pallida. Heproved that this was the cause of the disease of the loath-some name. Of course Paul Ehrlich (who knew every-

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thing) read about that, but it particularly stuck in Ehr-lich’s memory that Schaudinn had said: “This pale spiro-chete belongs to the animal kingdom, it is not like the bac-teria. Indeed, it is closely related to the trypanosomes. . . .Spirochetes may sometimes turn into trypanosomes. . . .”

Now, it was hardly more than a guess of that romanticSchaudinn that spirochetes had anything to do with trypa-nosomes, but it set Paul Ehrlich aflame.

“If the pale spirochete is a cousin of the trypanosome ofthe mal de Caderas—then 606 ought to hit that spirochete.. . . What kills trypanosomes should kill their cousins!”Paul Ehrlich was not bothered by the fact that there wasno proof these two microbes were cousins. . . . Not he. Sohe marched towards his day of days.

He gave vast orders. He smoked more strong cigars eachday. Presently regiments of fine male rabbits trooped intothe Georg Speyer House in Frankforton-the-Main, andwith these creatures came a small and most diligent Japa-nese microbe hunter, S. Hata. This S. Hata was accurate.He was capable. He could stand the strain of doing thesame experiment a dozen times over and he could, so nim-ble was this S. Hata, do a dozen experiments at the sametime. So he suited the uses of Ehrlich, who was a thoroughman, do not forget it!

Hata started out by doing long tests with 606 on spiro-chetes not so pale or so dangerous. There was that spiro-chete fatal to chickens. . . . The results? “Un-heard . . .of! In-cred-i-ble!” shouted Paul Ehrlich. Chickens androosters whose blood swarmed with that microbe receivedtheir shot of 606. Next day the chickens were clucking androosters strutting—it was superb. But that disease of theloathsome name?

On the 31st of August, 1909, Paul Ehrlich and Hatatfqod before a cage in which sat an excellent buck rabbit.

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Flourishing in every way was this rabbit, excepting for thetender skin of his scrotum, which was disfigured with twotefrible ulcers, each bigger than a twenty-five-cent piece.These sores were caused by the gnawing of the pale spiro-chete of the disease that is the reward of sin. They hadbeen put under the skin of that rabbit by S. Hata a monthbefore. Under the microscope—it was a special one builtfor spying just such a thin rogue as that pale microbe—under this lens Hata put a wee drop of the fluid fromthese ugly sores. Against the blackness of the dark field ofthis special microscope, gleaming in a powerful beam oflight that hit them sidewise, shooting backwards and for-wards like ten thousand silver drills and augers, playedmyriads of these pale spirochetes. It was a pretty picture,to hold you there for hours, but it was sinister—for whatliving things can bring worse plague and sorrow to men?

Hata leaned aside. Paul Ehrlich looked down the shinytube. Then he looked at Hata, and then at the rabbit.

“Make the injection,” said Paul Ehrlich. And into the ear-vein of that rabbit went the clear yellow fluid of the solu-tion of 606, for the first time to do battle with the diseaseof the loathsome name.

Next day there was not one of those spiral devils to befound in the scrotum of that rabbit. His ulcers? Theywere drying already I Good clean scabs were forming onthem. In less than a month there was nothing to be seenbut tiny scabs—it was like a cure of Bible times—no less!And a little while after that Paul Ehrlich could write:

“It is evident from these experiments that, if a largeenough dose is given, the spirochetes can be destroyed abso-lutely and immediately with a single injection!”

This was Paul Ehrlich’s day of days. This was themagic bullet! And what a safe bullet! Of course there wasno danger in it—look at all these cured rabbits! They had

never turned a hair when Hata shot into their ear-veinsdoses of 606 three times as big as the amount that surelyand promptly cured them. It was more marvelous than hisdreams, which all searchers in Germany had smiled at.Now he would laugh! “It is safe!” shouted Paul Ehrlich,and you can guess what visions floated into that too confi-dent man’s imagination. “It is safe—perfectly safe!” he as-sured every one. But at night, sitting in the almost un-breathable fog of cigar smoke in his study, alone, amongthose piles of books and journals that heaped up fantasticshadows round him, sitting there before the pads of blueand green and yellow and orange note paper on whichevery night he scrawled hieroglyphic directions for the nextday’s work of his scientific slaves, Paul Ehrlich, noted as aman of action, whispered:

“Is it safe?”

Arsenic is the favorite poison of murderers. . . . “Buthow wonderfully we have changed it!” Paul Ehrich pro-tested.

What saves mice and rabbits might murder men. . . .“The step from the laboratory to the bedside is dangerous—but it must be taken!” answered Paul Ehrlich. You re-member his gray eyes, that were so kind.

But, heigho! Here was the next morning, the bravelight of the bright morning. Here was the laboratory withits cured rabbits, here was that wizard, Bertheim—how hehad twisted that arsenic through all these six hundred andsix compounds. That man could not go wrong. So manyof them had been dangerous that this six hundred andsixth one must be safe. . . . Bravo! Here was the mixedgood smell of a hundred experimental animals and a thou-sand chemicals. Here were all these men and women, howthey believed in him! So, let’s go! Let us try it!

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At bottom Paul Ehrlich wus a gambler, as who of thegreat line of the microbe hunters has not been?

• And before that sore on the scrotum of the first rabbithad shed its last scab, Paul Ehrlich had written to hisfriend, Dr. Konrad Alt: “Will you be so good as to trythis new preparation, 606, on human beings with syphilis?”

Of course Alt wrote back: “Certainly 1” which any Ger-man doctor—for they are right hardy fellows—would havereplied.

Came 1910, and that was Paul Ehrlich’s year. One day,that year, he walked into the scientific congress at Koenigs-berg, and there was applause. It was frantic, it was long,you would think they were never going to let Paul Ehrlichsay his say. He told of how the magic bullet had beenfound at last. He told of the terror of the disease of theloathsome name, of those sad cases that went to horribledisfiguring death, or to what was worse—the idiot asylums.They went there in spite of mercury—mercury fed themand rubbed into them and shot into them until theirteeth were like to drop out of their gums. He told of suchcases given up to die. One shot of the compound six hun-dred and six, and they were up, they were on their feet.They gained thirty pounds. They were clean once more—their friends would associate with them again. . . . PaulEhrlich told, that day, of healings that could only becalled Biblical! Of a wretch, so dreadfully had the palespirochetes gnawed at his throat that he had had to be fedliquid food through a tube for months. One shot of the606, at two in the afternoon, and at supper time that manhad eaten a sausage sandwich! There were poor women,innocent sufferers from the sins of their men—there wasone woman with pains in her bones, such pains she hadbeen given morphine every night for years, to give her a

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little sleep. One shot of compound six hundred and six.She had gone to sleep, quiet and deep, with no morphine,that very night. It was Biblical, no less. It was miraculoqs—no drug nor herb of the old women and priests andmedicine men of the ages had ever done tricks like that.No serum nor vaccine of the modern microbe hunterscould come near to the beneficent slaughterings of themagic bullet, compound six hundred and six.

Never was there such applause.

Never has it been better earned, for that day Paul Ehrlich—forget for a moment the false hopes raised and thetroubles that followed—that day Paul Ehrlich had ledsearchers around a corner.

But, to every action there is an equal and opposite reac-tion. What is true in the realm of lifeless things is true inthe lives of such men as Paul Ehrlich. The whole worldbawled for salvarsan. That was what Ehrlich—we must for-give him his grandiloquence—called compound six hundredand six. Then, in the laboratory of the Georg SpeyerHouse, Bertheim and ten assistants—worn these fellowswere before they started it—turned out hundreds of thou-sands of doses of this marvelous stuff. They did the job ofa chemical factory in their small laboratory, in the danger-ous fumes of ether, in the fear that one little slip mightrob a hundred men and women of life, for it was two-edged stuff, that salvarsan. And Ehrlich? Now he wasonly a shell of a man, with diabetes—and why did hekeep on smoking more cigars?—now Ehrlich burned thecandle in the middle.

He was everywhere in the Georg Speyer House. Hedirected the making of compounds that would be still morewonderful—so he hoped. He chased around so that evenKadereit couldn’t keep track of him. He dictated hundredsof enthusiastic letters to Martha Marquardt, he read thou-

39°

sands of letters from every corner of the world, he keptrecords, careful records they were too, of every one of thesixty-five thousand doses of salvarsan injected in the year1910. He kept them—this was like that strangely sys-tematic manl—on a big sheet of paper tacked to the insideof the cupboard door of his office, from the top tothe bottom of that door in tiny scrawls, so that he hadconstantly to squat on his heels or stretch on tiptoe andstrain his eyes to read them.

As the list grew, there were records of most extraor-dinary cures, but there were reports it was not pleasant toread, too, records that told of hiccups and vomitings andstiffenings of legs and convulsions and death—every nowand then a death in people who had no business dying,coming right after injections of the salvarsan.

How he worked to explain them! How he wore himselfto a shred to avoid them, for Paul Ehrlich was not a hard-boiled man. He made experiments; he conducted immensecorrespondences in which he asked minute questions ofiust how the injections had been made. He devised ex-planations, on the margins of the playing cards he usedfor his games of solitaire each evening, on the backs ofthose blood-and-thunder murder mysteries that were theone thing he read—so he imagined—to rest. But he neverrested! Those disasters pursued him and marred his tri-umph. . . .

The wrinkles deepened to ditches on his forehead. Thecircles darkened under those gray eyes that still, but notso often, danced with that owlish humor.

So this compound six hundred and six, saving its thou-sands from death, from insanity, from the ostracism worsethan death that came to those sufferers whose bodies thepale spirochete gnawed until they were things for loathing,this 606 began killings its tens. Paul Ehrlich wore his too

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feeble body to a shadow, trying to explain a mystery toodeep for explanation. There is no light on that mysterynow, ten years after Ehrlich smoked the last of his blackcigars. So it was that this triumph of Paul Ehrlich was atthe same time the last disproof of his theories, tohich wereso often wrong. “Compound six hundred and six uniteschemically with the spirochetes and kills them—it doesnot unite chemically with the human body and so cando no damage!” That had been his theory. . . .

But alas! What is the chemistry of what this subtle 606does to the still more subtle—and unknown—machine thatis the human body? Nothing is known about it even now.Paul Ehrlich paid the penalty for his fault—which may beforgiven him seeing the blessings he has brought to men—his fault of not foreseeing that once in every so many thou-sands of bodies a magic bullet may shoot two ways. Butthen, the microbe hunters of the great line have alwaysbeen gamblers: let us think of the good brave adventurerPaul Ehrlich was and the thousands he has saved.

Let us remember him, trail-breaker who turned a cor-ner for microbe hunters and started them looking for magicbullets. Already (though it is too soon to tell the wholestory) certain obscure searchers, some of them old slavesof Paul Ehrlich; sweating in the great dye factories of El-berfeld, have hit upon a most fantastical drug. Its chem-istry is kept a secret. It is called “Bayer 205.” It is a mildmysterious powder that cures the hitherto always fatalsleeping sickness of Rhodesia and Nyassaland. That wasthe ill, you remember, that the hard man, David Bruce,fought his last fight, in vain, to prevent. It does outlandishthings to the cells and fluids of the human body—you wouldsay they were fibs and fairy tales if you heard the queerthings that drug can do! But what is best, it slaughters mi-crobes! It kills them beautifully, precisely, with a complete-

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ness that must make Paul Ehrlich wriggle in his grave—and when it doesn’t kill microbes it tames them.

*It is as sure as the sun following the dawn of to-morrowthat there will be other microbe hunters to mold othermagic bullets, surer, safer, bullets to wipe out for alwaysthe most malignant microbes of which this history has told.Let us remember Paul Ehrlich, who broke this trail. . . .

This plain history would not be complete if I were notto make a confession, and that is this: that I love thesemicrobe hunters, from old Antony Leeuwenhoek to PaulEhrlich. Not especially for the discoveries they have madenor for the boons they have brought mankind. No. I lovethem for the men they are. I say they are, for in my mem-ory every man jack of them lives and will survive untilthis brain must stop remembering.

So I love Paul Ehrlich—he was a gay man who carriedhis medals about with him all mixed up in a box neverknowing which ones to wear on what night. He was animpulsive man who has, on occasion, run out of his bed-room in his shirt tail to greet a fellow microbe hunter whocame to call him out for an evening of wassail.

And he was an owlish man! “You say a great work ofthe mind, a wonderful scientific achievement?” he repeatedafter a worshiper who told him that was what the dis-covery of 606 was.

“My dear colleague,” said Paul Ehrlich, “for seven yearsof misfortune I had one moment of good luck!”

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INDEX

Acadbmt op Sciences, French, 15,39, 71, 74, 79; Pasteur’s reportto, 40, 173

Agramonte, Aristides, 344Albumen in fermentation, 76 fol.Alt, Dr. Konrad, 389Animal Industry, U. S. Bureau of,161

Anopheles clavtger, 332.

Anthrax, 118 fol., 165 fol.; failureof vaccine against, 182.; spores,

*3/

Antisepsis, noArsenic compounds, 381Arterio-sclerosis, MetchnikofTs the-ories on, 153, 2.56Atoxyl, 381

Auto intoxication, Metchniko/Ftheory on, 2.56

Bacilli, cause of anthrax, noBalard, 87Bassi, Laura, 19Bastianelli, Dr., 333Baumgarten, 141Bayer 20/, 392.

Behring, Emil, discovery of diph-theria antitoxin, L03, xiz fol.Benzo-purpurin dyes, Ehrlich’s useof, 377

Berlin Imperial Health Office, 134,136

Bernard, Claude, 79, inBertheim, 383Bertin, 107Biggs, Dr., inBillings, 165

Blood-serum jelly, 147Bonnet, Charles, 35, 50, 55Bordet, Jules, X49Boyle, Robert, 6

Bruce, David, 177 fol.; Malta fever,X78 fol.; nagana, x8i fol.; sleep-ing sickness, 189 fol.; tsetse fly,185

Buda-Pesth, Congress of, XX5 fol.Buffon, Count, 38Bulgarian milk bacillus, Z56

Carroll, James, 340Castellani, 190Chamberland, i6z, 173Chappuis, 64Charles II, of England, 6Child-bed fever, 160Cholera, Asiatic, 154; comma mi-crobe, 156 fol.

Cholera, chicken, 167 fol.

Cohn,131Cohnheim, 133, 141Comma microbe, discovery of, incholera, 156 fol.

Consumption, 118Cooke, Dr., 356Cromwell, 6Curtice, Cooper, z68

Darwinian Theory, MetchnikofTsinterest in, 130,131Davaine, noDean, William, 350De Graaf, Regnier, 7De la Rochette, Baron, 175De la Tour, Cagniard, 6a

De Saussure, 55

Diphtheria antitoxin, discovery,2.03; iodine tri-chloride as cure,115 fol.; microbe, 141Duclaux, 96Dumas, Alexandre, 94Dumas, (chemist), 64, 79, 99Dyes, Ehrlich's use of, 369 fol.

Edgrbn, 2.53Ehrenberg, 63

Ehrlich, Paul, 133, 113, 366 fol.Ellis, 56, 38

Erysipelas, research on, 153 fol.

Fbhleisen, 153; research on erysipe-las, 153 fol.

Fermentation, Pasteur's studies in,69 fol.

Finlay, Dr. Carlos, 342.

Frederick the Great, 48Fission, reproduction by, 55Folk, Levi E., 356Fraatz, Emmy, 115, 319Frcmy, 108

Gaffky, 138; search for typhoidfever microbe, 142.

Galileo, 2.

GaraaI6ia, Dr., 139Garr£, 154Gernez, 103Gorgas, Wm. C , 361Grancher, Dr., 198Grassi, Battista, 305 fol., 317Grew, Nehemiah, 16Gu6rin, Jules, 171Guitdras, Dr. John, 361

Hanging Drop, invention of, 124Harvey, William, 19Hata, S., 386

Hely-Hutchinson, Sir Walter, 2.80Hoogvliet, 14Hooke, Robert, 16

Husein Khan, 317Hydrophobia, 61 fol.

•

Immunization, Metchnikolf’s the-ory of, through phagocytes, 135fol.; MetchnikofF’s treatise on,2.51; Pasteur’s theory of, 166Invisible College, the, 6Iodine tri-chloride, Behring’s curefor diphtheria, 2.15 fol.

Jenner, 171

Jernegan, Walter G., 356Joly, 91

Joseph II, 51 fol.

Joubert, 162.

Jupille, 148

Kilborne, 2.61 fol.

Kissenger, Pvt., 353Kitasato, 2.13

Koch, Robert, 114, fol.; anthrax-spores, 231; Berlin ImperialHealth Office, 134, 136; discoveryof comma microbe in cholera,156 fol.; invention of blood-serumjelly, 147; invention of hangingdrop, 114; isolation of a singlemicrobe, 137; microscopic pho-tography, 135; reply to Pasteur,184; research on cholera, 154; ondiphtheria antitoxin, Z04; searchfor tuberculosis microbe, 141;confirmation of theory, 141 fol.;tuberculosis cure, 112.

Laveran, Alphonse, 308, 375Lavoisier, 83Lazear, Jesse, 341

Leeuwenhoek, Antony, 2. fol.; anadmirer of God, iz; discovery ofcapillary blood vessels, 19; dis-covers human sperm, 19; discoversmicrobes, 9 fol.; discovers mi-crobes in mouth, 17 fol.; discoverssterilization by heat, zz; failure

396

to find disease microbes, 2.2.; let-ters to Leibniz, 24; letters toRoyal Society, 7,15; microbes inpepper water, 14Leibniz, Gottfried, 14Leuckart, 2.30Le Verrier, 90Liebig, 76Linnzus, 62.

Lister, no, 116

Loeffler, Frederick, 138; search fordiphtheria microbe, 141; researchon diphtheria antitoxin, 103 fol.Louvrier, 165

Maillot, 103Maisonneuve, 155

Malaria, 305 fol.; anopheles clavi&er,331; of birds, 311; Dr. Bastianelli,333* 334; Ross» 305; Grassi, 305,317; Laveran, 308; Manson, 309; %zanzarone mosquito, 331 fol.Malta fever, 178 fol.

Manson, Patrick, 309 fol.

Maria Theresa, 48Meister, Joseph, 198Metchnikoff, E., 2.06, 2.2.8 fol.; ap-pointment to Institute of Odessa,138; at Pasteur Institute, 2-41 fol.;experiments with water fleas, 2.37;meeting with Pasteur, 140; secondmarriage, 132.; experiments withstar fish, 133; experiments withsyphilis, 2.54 fol.; idiosyncrasies,244 fol.; professorship in Univ.of Odessa, 2.31; theory of pha-gocytes, 2.34 fol.; theories on ageand death, 2.51 fol., 156; treatiseon immunity, 151Metchnikoff, Ludmilla, 131Microbes, as causes of disease, 94,fol.; discovery by Leeuwenhoek,

9 fol.; existence in air, 90 fol.; in• vacuum, 50, 82.; isolation of sin-gle, 57.137 fol-i origin of, 11, 84;spores of, 131

Molyneux, 16Moran, John J., 353Mosquito, carrier of malaria, 305fol.; Manson, 309; yellow fevercause, 345Musset, 92.

Nabarro, 2.91Magana, 2.81 fol.

Napoleon III, 94

Needham, John T., experiments onspontaneous generation of mi-crobes, 32. fol.

Newton, Isaac, 6Nocard, 196

Paris Normal School, Pasteur at, 75Paris Observatory, 90Park, Dr., 2.22., 2.2.7Pasteur, Louis, 57 fol., 115 fol., 160fol.; decorated, 181, 2.00, 2.01; dis-covery of microbes in the mouth,188; discovery of vaccine, 170;election to French Academy, 185;failure of anthrax vaccine, 182.;letter from Lister, 110; hatred ofGermany, 106; research on child-bed fever, 161; anthrax, 165 fol.;Asiatic cholera, 154; chickencholera, 167 fol.; beer, 106; hy-drophobia, 182., 187 fol.; silk-worms, 99 fol.; wine, 96 fol.; testbefore veterinarians, 174 fol.; the-ory of immunity, 166Pasteur Institute, founded by Czarof Russia, xoo

Pasteurization of beer, 107; wine, 97Pavia, University of, 48Peter the Great, 19Pettenkofer, 158Photography, microscopic, 135Pidoux, 118

Pompadour, Madame de, 2.8Pouchet, 91

Pouilly-le-fort, Pasteur's anthraxdemonstration at, 174 fol.

397

Rabies, research on, 181, 187 fol.

Rayer, 12.0

Redi, Francesco, 31

Reed, Emilie L., 363

Reed, Walter, 340 fol.

Renan, Ernest, 185Reproduction by fission, 35Ross (naturalist), quoted, 30Ross, Ronald, 303 fol.

Rossignol, 174

Roux, Emil, 74, 155, j6i, 173, 102.fol., m, 153

Royal Prussian Institute for SerumTesting, 373

Royal Society of England, 7Royal Society, as audience forLeeuwenhoek, 7, 13, 15; confirmLeeuwenhoek’s discovery of mi-crobes, 16; elect LeeuwenhoekFellow, 16

Russian peasants, saved by Pasteur,

*99

Salmon, Dr., 2.61, 2.62.

Salvarsan, 390Sand, George, 94Scarpa, 53

Schaudinn, Fritz, 385Schwann, 65Scopoli, 53Semmelweis, 160Servetus, 2.

Shiga, Dr., 376 fol.

Side-chain theory, Ehrlich’s, 373Sleeping sickness, Bayer 20/, 391;Castellani, 189, 190; Bruce, 189fol.; Tulloch, 199; Taute, 303Smith, Theobald, 138Sola, malaria experiments on, 333Spallanzani, Lazzaro, 2.3 fol.; atUniversity of Pavia, 48 fol.;experiments with seeds, 33 fol.;trip to Constantinople, 31fol.;

Speyer, Franziska, 380Spirocbeta pallida, 385

Spontaneous generation disproved,89

Spores, 131 f

Stains, use by Ehrlich, 369 fol.Syphilis, Ehrlich’s research, 367fol.; Metchnikoff’s experimentswith, 2.54

Taute, 303

Texas fever, 159

Ticks and Texas fever, 163 fol.

Thuillier, 155, 177, 191

Trecul, 108

Trypanosomes, 183,191Trypan red, 379Tsetse fly, 2.85

Tuberculosis, microbe of, 141; con'firmation of theory, 142. fol.Tulloch, 2.99Tyndall, 93

- Typhoid fever microbe, 142.

Vaccine, discovery of, 170Vallisnieri, 2.7

Vergel, Jules, letter from Pasteur,198

Villemin, 141

Virchow, Rudolf, 139, 151 fol., 135Volta, Canon, 53 fol.

Voltaire, 2.8, 44Vulpian, Dr., 198

Wassermann Test, Bordet 's prepar-ation for, 2.50

Yeast, 65 fol., 86, in grapes, 108fol.. Ill

Yellow fever, 340 fol.; Wm. C.Gorgas, 361; I>r. John Guit6ras,361; test volunteers Cooke, Folk,Jernegan, 356

Yellow Fever Commission, 344Yersin, 107 fol. .

Zavzarovr Mosquito, 331 fol

crd-lout the

PAUL DE KRUIF is famous for making unknown, orlittle-known, benefactors of mankind live again. He has apassion for finding out who really stamped out some greatscourge, or bred the best corn, or made a great discoverywhich civilization now takes for granted. And to do thishe goes straight to original sources with an energy and thor*oughness that is intolerant of half-way measures: tf originalletters and records, to the men themselves when they arealive and can be found.

Dr. de Kruif was born in 1890 in Zeeland, Michigan. Heholds a B.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan,where he was, at twenty-six, Assistant Professor of Bacteri-ology. During the war he was in France as a Captain inthe Sanitary Corps of the Medical Department of the U. S.Army. His main work was on the poison and antitoxin ofthe bacillus of gas gangrene. He made the first prophylacticinjections of gas gangrene serum into the wounded of theAmerican Army, Fifth Division. While in France heworked at the Pasteur Institute and at the Central MedicalDepartment Laboratory in Dijon. After that he spent twoyears at the Rockefeller Institute as an associate in the Divi-sion of Pathology. During those five years his writings andresearch work were so remarkable that he won world-widerecognition among bacteriologists and medical men.

Through all this, Paul de Kruif was more and moredriven by a desire to know the human side of highly tech-nical work, so he began to study lives and people as well asb;*cteria, and in 1926 published Microbe Hunters. Amonghis best-known books are Hunger Fighters, Seven Iron Men,

399

and Men Against Death. This latter book is a dramaticcounterpart to his Microbe Hunters; it tells the stories ofmicrobe hunters of the modern age. s

Dr. de Kruif is over six feet, broad-shouldered, and ro-bust in thought and action. He loves chopping wood, swim-ming against strong currents, motoring five hundred milesa day—anything that takes great vitality. Every summer hegoes to his bungalow on the shore of Lake Michigan wherehe and Mrs. de Kruif live among the giant dark pines withthe lake surf crashing near their door. When he is in NewYork he feels so confined that every day he walks and runsfour mills—mostly runs. Every now and then, too, he goeson an emotional spree with Beethoven. For Beethtfven hereserves his final hero worship and can listen to the Thirdand Ninth Symphonies all night.