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everything under the sun, until he ran on to this blood of sheep and cattle dead of anthrax. Then he began to concentrate, to forget about making a call when he found a dead sheep in a field—he haunted butcher shops to find out about the farms where anthrax was killing the flocks. Koch hadn't the leisure of Leeuwenhoek; he had to snatch moments for his peerings, between prescribing for some child that bawled with a bellyache and the pulling out of a villager's aching tooth. In these interrupted hours he put drops of the blackened blood of a cow dead of anthrax between two thin pieces of glass, very clean shining bits of glass. He looked down the tube of his microscope and among the wee round drifting greenish globules of this blood he saw strange things that looked like little sticks. Sometimes these sticks were short, there might be only a few of them, floating, quivering a little, among the blood globules. But here were others, hooked together without joints—many of them ingeniously glued together till they appeared to him like long threads a thousand times thinner than the finest silk.

"What are these things . . . are they microbes . . . are they alive? They do not move . . . maybe the sick blood of these poor beasts just changes into these threads and rods," Koch pondered. Other men of science, Davaine and Rayer in France, had seen these same things in the blood of dead sheep; and they had announced that these rods were bacilli, living germs, that they were undoubtedly the real cause of anthrax—but they hadn't proved it, and except for Pasteur, no one in Europe believed them. But Koch was not particularly interested in what anybody else thought about the threads and rods in the blood of dead sheep and cattle—the doubts and the laughter of doctors failed to disturb him, and the enthusiasms of Pasteur did not for one moment make him jump at conclusions. Luckily nobody anxious to develop young microbe hunters had ever heard of Koch, he was a lone wolf searcher—he was his own man, alone with the mysterious tangled threads in the blood of the dead beasts.

"I do not see a way yet of finding out whether these little