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with that terribly pedantic, but careful, truth-hunting little czar of microbe hunters squinting at him from behind those eternal spectacles?

One dead child after another Loeffler examined; he poked into every part of each pitiful body; he stained a hundred different slices of every organ; he tried—and quickly succeeded—in growing those queer barred bacilli pure. But everywhere he searched, in every part of each body, he found no microbes—except in the membrane-cluttered throat. And always here, in every child but one or two, he came on those Indian club-shaped rods. “How can these few microbes, growing nowhere in the body but the throat—how can these few germs, staying in that one place, kill a child so quickly?” pondered Loeffler. “But I must follow Herr Koch’s directions!” and he proceeded to shoot the germs of his pure cultivations into the windpipes of rabbits and beneath the skins of guinea-pigs. Quickly these animals died—in two or three days, like a child, or even more quickly—but the microbes, which Loeffler had shot into them in millions, could only be found at the spot where he had injected them. . . . And sometimes there were none to be found even here, or at best a few feeble ones hardly strong enough, you would think, to hurt a flea. . . .

“But how is it these few bacilli—sticking in one little corner of the body—how can they topple over a beast a million times larger than they are themselves?” asked Loeffler.

Never was there a more conscientious searcher than this Loeffler, nor one with less of a wild imagination to liven—or to spoil—his almost automatic exactness. He sat himself down; he wrote a careful scientific paper; it was modest, it was cold, it was not hopeful, it was a most unlawyer-like report reciting all of the fors and againsts on the question of whether or no this new bacillus was the cause of diphtheria. He leaned over backward to be honest—he put last the facts that were against it! “This microbe may be the cause,” you can hear him mumbling as he wrote, “but in a few children dead of diphtheria I could not find these germs . . . none of my inoculated animals