Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/141
realized the beauty or the importance of his lonely experiments.
He plugged on. He must know more! He went pell-mell at the inoculating of guinea-pigs and rabbits, and at last even sheep, with the innocent looking but fatal fluid from the 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 multiplied into billions in the animals, in a few hours they teemed poisonously in what had been robust tissues, choking the little veins and arteries with their myriads, turning to a sinister black the red blood—so killing the sheep, the guinea-pigs, and the rabbits.
At one fantastic jump Koch had soared out of the vast anonymous rank and file of pill-rollers and landed among the most original of the searchers, and the more ingeniously he hunted microbes, the more miserably he tended to the important duties of his practice. Babies in far-off farms howled, but he did not come; peasants, with jumping aches in their teeth, waited sullen hours for him—and at last he had to turn over part of his practice to another doctor. Mrs. Koch saw little of him and worried and wished he would not go on his calls smelling of germicides and of his menagerie of animals. But so far as he was concerned his suffering patients and his wife might have been inhabitants of the other side of the moon—for a new mysterious question was worrying at his head, tugging at him, keeping him awake:
How, in nature, do these little weak anthrax bacilli that fade away and die so easily on my slides, how do they get from sick animals to healthy ones?
There were superstitions among the farmers and horse doctors of Europe about this disease, strange beliefs in regard to the mysterious power of this plague that hung always over their flocks and herds like some cruel invisible sword. Why, this disease is too terrible to be caused by such a wretched little creature as a twenty-thousandth-of-an-inch-long bacillus!
"Your little germ may be what kills our herds, all right,