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nose and set to work in the right, classic way of Koch—with an astounding instinct he avoided the cruder methods of Pasteur.
III
You talk about freedom of science! You think a free choice to dig in any part of the Unknown is needed by searchers? I used to think so, and I have got into trouble with eminent authorities for saying so—too loudly. Wrong! For Theobald Smith, with little more freedom to start with than some low government clerk—had to research into things Dr. Salmon told him to research at, and Dr. Salmon was paid to direct Smith to solve puzzles which were bothering the farmers and stock-raisers. Such was science in the Bureau of Animal Industry. Dr. Salmon and Bachelor Kilborne and Theobald Smith—to say nothing of the indispensable Alexander—were expected to rush out like firemen and squirt science on the flaming epidemics threatening the pigs and heifers and bulls and rams of the farmers of the land. Just then the stock-raisers were seriously upset by a very weird disease, the Texas fever.
Southern cattlemen bought northern cattle; they were unloaded from their box-cars and put to graze on the fields along with perfectly healthy southern cows; everything would go well for a month or so, and then, bang! an epidemic burst out among northern cows. They stopped eating, they lost dozens of pounds a day, their urine ran strangely red, they stood aimless with arched backs and sad eyes—and in a few days every last one of the fine northern herd lay stiff-legged on the field. The same thing happened when southern steers and heifers were shipped North; they were put into northern fields, grazed there awhile, were driven away perhaps; when northern cows were turned into those fields where their southern sisters had been, in thirty days or so they began to die—in ten days after that a whole fine herd might be under the ground.