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provided that he would settle down to be a practicing doctor, a good useful citizen, in Germany.

Koch listened to Emmy—for a moment the allure of fifty years of bliss with her chased away his dreams of elephants and Patagonia—and he settled down to practice medicine; he began what was to him a totally uninteresting practice of medicine in a succession of unromantic Prussian villages.

Just now, while Koch wrote prescriptions and rode horseback through the mud and waited up nights for Prussian farmer women to have their babies, Lister in Scotland was beginning to save the lives of women in childbirth—by keeping microbes away from them. The professors and the students of the medical colleges of Europe were beginning to be excited and to quarrel about Pasteur’s theory of malignant microbes, here and there men were trying crude experiments, but Koch was almost as completely cut off from this world of science as old Leeuwenhoek had been, two hundred years before, when he first fumbled at grinding glass into lenses in Delft in Holland. It looked as if his fate was to be the consoling of sick people and the beneficent and praiseworthy attempt to save the lives of dying people—mostly, of course, he did not save them—and his wife Emmy was quite satisfied with this and was proud when Koch earned five dollars and forty-five cents on especially busy days.

But Robert Koch was restless. He trekked from one deadly village to another still more uninteresting, until at last he came to Wollstein, in East Prussia, and here, on his twenty-eighth birthday, Mrs. Koch bought him a microscope to play with.

You can hear the good woman say: “Maybe that will take Robert’s mind off what he calls his stupid practice. . . perhaps this will satisfy him a little. . . he’s always looking at everything with his old magnifying glass. . . .”

Alas for her, this new microscope, this plaything, took her husband on more curious adventures than any he would have met in Tahiti or Lahore; and these weird experiences—that