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Meanwhile, at the end of 1882, when Koch had finished his virulent and partly comic wrangle with Pasteur, who was just then with prodigious enthusiasm saving the lives of sheep and cattle in France, the discoverer of the tubercle bacillus started sniffing along the trail of one of the most delicate, the most easy to kill, and yet the most terribly savage of all microbes. In 1883 the Asiatic cholera knocked at the door of Europe. This cholera had stolen out of its lurking place in India and slipped mysteriously across the sea and over desert sands to Egypt; suddenly a murderous epidemic of it exploded in Alexandria and Europe across the Mediterranean was frightened. In Alexandria the streets were still with fear; the murderous virus—no one had the slightest notion of what kind of an invisible beast it was—this virus, I say, sneaked into healthy men in the morning, doubled them into knots of spasm-racked agony by afternoon, and put them to rest beyond the reach of all pain by night.

Then a strange race started between Pasteur and Koch, which meant between France and Germany, to search out the microbe of this cholera that flared threatening on the horizon. Koch and Gaffky went armed with microscopes and a menagerie of animals from Berlin; Pasteur—who was desperately busy struggling to conquer the mysterious microbe of hydrophobia—sent the brilliant and devoted Émile Roux and the silent Thuillier, youngest of the microbe hunters of Europe. Koch and Gaffky worked forgetting to eat or sleep; they toiled in dreadful rooms cutting up the bodies of Egyptians dead of cholera; in their muggy laboratory with the air fairly dripping with a steamy heat, sweat dropping off the ends of their noses on to the lenses of their microscopes, they shot stuff from the tragic carcasses of just-dead Alexandrians into apes and dogs and hens and mice and cats. But while these rival teams of searchers hunted frantically the epidemic began to fade away as mysteriously as it came. None of them had yet found a microbe they could surely accuse, and all of them—there is a kind of twisted humor in this—grumbled as they