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culin." But at the same time he guided his youngsters in fine jobs they were doing—and among these young men was Emil August Behring. How Koch pointed the gun of his cold marvelous criticism at that poet's searchings!
And what a house of microbe hunters it was, that dingy Triangel! Its walls shook under the arguments and guttural cries and incessant experiments of Koch's young men. Paul Ehrlich was there, smoking myriads of cigars, smearing his clothes and his hands and even his face with a prismatic array of dyes, making bold experiments to find out how baby mice inherit immunity to certain vegetable poisons from their mothers. . . . Kitasato, the round-faced Japanese, was shooting lock-jaw bacilli into the tails of mice and solemnly amputating these infected tails—to see whether the creatures would perish from the poisons the microbes had made while the tails were still attached. . . . And there were many others there, some forgotten and some whose names are now famous. With a vengeance the Germans were setting out to beat the French, to bury them under a vast confusion of experiments, to save mankind first.
But particularly, Emil Behring was there. He was a little over thirty; he was an army doctor; he had a little beard, neater than Koch's scraggly one, but with less signs of originality. Just the same Behring's head, in spite of that prosaic beard, was the head of a poet; and yet, though he was fond of rhetoric, no one stuck closer to his laboratory bench than Behring. He compared the grandeur of the Master's discovery of the tubercle bacillus to the rosy tip of the snow-capped peak of his favorite mountain in Switzerland, while he probed by careful experiments into why animals are immune to microbes. He compared the stormy course of human pneumonia to the rushing of a mountain stream, while he discovered a something in the blood of rats-this stuff would kill anthrax bacilli! He had two scientific obsessions, which were also poetical: one was that blood is the most marvelous of the juices circulating in living things (what an extraordinary mysterious sap