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by have revealed that Pettenkofer's experiment pointed out a mystery behind the curtains of the unknown, and these obscuring draperies have not now even begun to be lifted by modern microbe hunters. Murderous germs are everywhere, sneaking into all of us, yet they are able to assassinate only some of us, and that question of the strange resistance of the rest of us is still just as much an unsolved puzzle as it was in those days of the roaring eighteen-eighties when men were ready to risk dying to prove that they were right.

For, make no mistake, Pettenkofer walked within an inch of death; other microbe hunters have since then swallowed cultures of virulent cholera microbes by accident—and died horribly.

But we come to the end of the great days of Robert Koch, and the exploits of Louis Pasteur begin once more to push Koch and all other microbe hunters into the background of the world's attention. Let us leave Koch while his ambitious but well-meaning countrymen prepare, without knowing it, a disaster for him, a tragedy that, alas, has partly tarnished the splendor of his trapping of the microbes that murder animals and men with anthrax and cholera and tuberculosis. But before you read the perfect and brilliant finale of the gorgeous career of Pasteur, I beg leave to remove my hat and make bows of respect to Koch—the man who really proved that microbes are our most deadly enemies, who brought microbe hunting near to being a science, the man who is now the partly forgotten captain of an obscure heroic age.