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one they died. And as these unconscious martyrs died—for Koch's mad curiosity and for suffering men—the little microbe hunter pinned them down on his post-mortem board and soaked their sick hair with bichloride of mercury and precisely and with breathless care cut them open with sterile knives.

And inside these poor beasts Koch found the same kind of grayish-yellow sinister tubercles that had filled the body of the workman. Into the baths of blue stain on his eternal strips of glass Koch dipped them—and everywhere, in every one, he found the same terrible curved sticks that had jumped into his astounded gaze when he had stained the lung of the dead man.

"I have it!" he whispered, and called the busy Loeffler and the faithful Gaffky from their own spyings on other microbes. "Look!" Koch cried. "One little speck of tubercle I put into this beast six weeks ago—there could not have been more than a few hundred of those bacilli in that small bit—and now they've grown into billions! What devils they are, those germs—from that one place in the guinea-pig's groin they have sneaked everywhere into his body, they have gnawed—they have grown through the walls of his arteries . . . the blood has carried them into his bones . . . into the farthest corner of his brain. . . ."

Now he went to hospitals everywhere in Berlin, and begged the bodies of men or women that had died of consumption, he spent dreary days in dead houses and every evening before his microscope in his laboratory where the stillness was broken only by the eerie purrings and scurryings of guinea-pigs. He injected the sick tissue from 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 twelve pigeons. He didn't stop with these wholesale insane inoculations but shot the same kind of deadly cheesy stuff into white mice and rats and field mice and into two marmots. Never in microbe hunting has there been such appalling thoroughness.

"Ach! this is a little hard on the nerves, this work," he