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The hopes of everybody were purple—surely now he would save children! While he was getting ready his serum for the first fateful test on some baby near to death with diphtheria, Behring sat down to write his classic report on how he could cure beasts sure to die, by shooting into them a new, an unbelievable stuff their brother beasts had made in their own bodies—at the risk of nearly dying themselves. "We have no certain recipe for making animals immune," wrote Behring; "these experiments I have recorded do not include only my successes." Surely they did not, for Behring set down the messings and the fiascoes along with the few lucky stabs that gave him his sanguinary victory. . . . How could this pottering poet have pulled off the discovery of the diphtheria antitoxin? But then, come to think of it, those first ancient nameless men who invented sails to carry swift boats across the water—they must have groped that way too. . . . How many of the crazy craft of those anonymous geniuses turned turtle? It is the way discoveries are made. . . .

Toward the end of the year 1891, babies lay dying of diphtheria in the Bergmann clinic in the Brick Street in Berlin. On the night of Christmas, a child desperately sick with diphtheria cried and kicked a little as the needle of the first syringe full of antitoxin slid under its tender skin.

The results seemed miraculous. A few children died; the little son of a famous physician of Berlin passed out mysteriously a few minutes after the serum went into him and there was a great hullabaloo about that—but presently large chemical factories in Germany took up the making of the antitoxin in herds of sheep. Within three years twenty thousand babies had been injected and like a rumor spread the news, and Biggs, the eminent American Health Officer, then in Europe, was carried away by the excitement. He cabled dramatically and authoritatively to Dr. Park in New York:

DIPHTHERIA ANTITOXIN IS A SUCCESS; BEGIN TO PRODUCE IT.