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Here he was given a fine laboratory and a sudden undreamed-of wealth of apparatus and two assistants and enough money so that he could spend sixteen or eighteen hours of his working day among his stains and tubes and chittering guinea-pigs.

By this time the news of Koch's discoveries had spread to all of the laboratories of Europe and had crossed the ocean and inflamed the doctors of America. The vast exciting Battle of the Germ Theory was on! Every medical man and Professor of Diseases who knew—or thought he knew—the top end from the bottom of a microscope set out to become a microbe hunter. Every week brought glad news of the supposed discovery of some new deadly microbe, surely the assassin of suffering from cancer or typhoid fever or consumption. One enthusiast would shout across 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 that he had proved one disease, let us say consumption, to be the result of the attack of a hundred different species of microbes.

So great was the enthusiasm about germs—and the confusion—that Koch's discoveries were in danger of being laughed into obscurity along with the vast magazines full of balderdash that were being printed on the subject of the germ theory.

And yet to-day we demand with a great hue and cry more laboratories, more microbe hunters, better paid searchers to free us from the diseases that scourge us. How futile! For progress, God must send us a few more infernal marvelous searchers of the kind of Robert Koch.

But in the midst of the danger that foolish enthusiasm would kill the new science of microbe hunting, Koch kept his head, and sat down to find a way to grow germs pure. "One germ, one kind of germ only, causes one definite kind of disease—every disease has its own specific microbe, I know that," said Koch—without knowing it. "I've got to find a sure easy