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on the surface of solid food—he shook the tree, as Gaffky said long afterward, and discoveries rained into his lap.

In all of his writings I have never found any evidence that Koch considered himself a great originator; never, like Pasteur, did he seem to realize that he was the leader in the most beautiful and one of the most thrilling battles of men against cruel nature—there was no actor in this mussy-bearded little man. But he did set under way an inspiring drama, a struggle with the messengers of death that turned some of the microbe-hunting actors into maniac searchers, men who went to nearly suicidal lengths, almost murderous extremes—to prove that microbes were the cause of dangerous diseases.

Doctor Fehleisen, to take one instance, went out from Koch's laboratory and found a curious little ball-shaped microbe, hitched to its brothers in chains like the beads of a rosary—he cultivated these bugs from skin gouged out of people sick with erysipelas, that sky-rockety disease that used to be called St. Anthony's Fire. On the theory that an attack of erysipelas might cure cancer—a mad man's excuse!—Fehleisen shot billions of these chain microbes, now known as streptococci, into people hopelessly sick with cancer. And in a few days each one of these human experimental animals of his flamed red with St. Anthony's Fire—some collapsed dangerously and nearly died—and so this desperado proved his case: That streptococcus is the cause of erysipelas.

Another pupil of Koch was the now forgotten hero, Doctor Garrè of Basel, who gravely rubbed whole test-tubes full of another kind of microbe—which Pasteur had alleged was the cause of boils—into his own arm. Garrè came down horribly with an enormous carbuncle and twenty boils—the tremendous dose of microbes he shot into himself might easily have finished him—but he dismissed his danger as merely "unpleasant" and shouted triumphantly: "I now know that this microbe, this staphylococcus, is the true cause of boils and carbuncles!"