Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/217

"It hits rabbits just the way it does children," muttered Roux, full of a will to believe—— "This bacillus must be the true cause of diphtheria. . . . I shall find the germ in these rabbits' bodies now!" And he clawed tissues out of a dozen corners of their carcasses; he made cultivations of their spleens and hearts—but never a bacillus! Only a few days before he had pumped a billion or so into them, each of them. Here they were, drawn and quartered, carved up and searched from their pink noses to the white under-side of their tails. And not a bacillus. What had killed them then?

Then Loeffler's prediction flashed over Roux: "It must be the germs make a poison, in this broth, to paralyze and kill these beasts . . ." he pondered.

For a while the searcher came uppermost in him. He forgot about possible savings of babies; he concentrated on vast butcheries of guinea-pigs and rabbits—he must prove that the diphtheria germ drips a toxin out of its wee body. . . . Together with Yersin he began a good unscientific fumbling at experiments; they were in the dark; there were no precedents nor any kind of knowledge to go by. No microbe hunter before them had ever separated a deadly poison (though Pasteur had once made something of a try at it) from the bodies of microbes. They were alone in the dark, Roux and Yersin—but they lighted matches. . . . "The bacilli must pour out a poison into the broth we grow them in—just as they pour it from their membrane in a child's throat into his blood!" Of course that last was not proved.

Then Roux stopped arguing in a circle. He searched. He worked with his hands. It was worse, this fumbling of his, than trying to get a stalled motor to go when you know nothing about internal combustion machinery. He took big glass bottles and put pure microbeless soup into them, and sowed pure cultivations of the diphtheria bacillus in this broth; into the incubating oven went the large-bellied bottles—— "Now we will try separating the germs from the soup in which they grow," said Roux, after the bottle had ripened for four days.