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the antitoxin cures. But it is not completely proved, and it is too late now to prove it one way or another to the hilt, because, since all the world believes in the antitoxin, no man can be found heartless enough or bold enough to do the experiment which science demands.

Meanwhile the searchers, believing, are busy with other things—and I can only hope, if another wave of the dreadful diphtheria of the eighties sweeps over the world again, I can only hope that Roux was right.

But even if the diphtheria antitoxin is not a sure cure, we already know that the experiments of Roux and Behring have not been in vain. It is a story still too recent, too much in the newspapers to be a part of this history—but to-day, in New York under the superb leadership of Dr. Park, and all over America, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of babies and school-children are being ingeniously and safely turned into so many small factories for the making of antitoxin, so that they will never get diphtheria at all. Under the skins of these youngsters go wee doses of that terrible poison fatal to so many big dogs—but it is a poison fantastically changed so that it is harmless to a week-old baby!

There is every hope, if fathers and mothers can only be convinced and allow their children to undergo three small safe pricks of a syringe needle, that diphtheria will no longer be the murderer that it has been for ages.

And for this men will thank those first crude searchings of Loeffler and Roux and Behring.