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Two hundred and fifty years ago an obscure man named Leeuwenhoek looked for the first time into a mysterious new world peopled with a thousand different kinds of tiny beings, some ferocious and deadly, others friendly and useful, many of them more important to mankind than any continent or archipelago.

Leeuwenhoek, unsung and scarce remembered, is now almost as unknown as his strange little animals and plants were at the time he discovered them. This is the story of Leeuwenhoek, the first of the microbe hunters. It is the tale of the bold and persistent and curious explorers and fighters of death who came after him. It is the plain history of their tireless peerings into this new fantastic world. They have tried to chart it, these microbe hunters and death fighters. So trying they have groped and fumbled and made mistakes and roused vain hopes. Some of them who were too bold have died—done to death by the immensely small assassins they were studying—and these have passed to an obscure small glory.

To-day it is respectable to be a man of science. Those who go by the name of scientist form an important element of the population, their laboratories are in every city, their achievements are on the front pages of the newspapers, often before they are fully achieved. Almost any young university student can go in for research and by and by become a comfortable science professor at a tidy little salary in a cozy college. But