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on Texas fever. "Discover the germ!" he told Smith. That year they had nothing but the spleens and livers of four dead Texas fever cows to investigate; packed in pails of ice, from Virginia and Maryland to his furnace-like attic came those livers and spleens. Theobald Smith had what so many of those mystified scientists and baffled horse doctors lacked—horse sense. He turned his microscope on to different bits of the first sample of spleen; he spied microbes in it; there was a veritable menagerie of different species of them.

Then Smith sniffed at that bit of spleen. He wrinkled up his nose—it smelled. It was spoiled.

At once he sent out messages, asking the stockmen to get the insides out of their cattle right away after they died, to pack them quickly in ice, to see they got to the laboratory more quickly. It was done, and in the next spleen he found no microbes at all—but only a great quantity of mysteriously broken up red corpuscles of the blood. "They look wrecked!" he said. But he could find no microbes. He was still young, and sarcastic, and impatient with any searcher who couldn't do close hard thinking. A man named Billings had claimed a foolish common bacillus (which he found in every part of every dead cow and in every corner of the barnyard—including the manure pile—as well) was the cause of Texas fever. Billings wrote a spread-eagle paper, saying: "The sun of original research, in disease, seems to be rising in the West instead of the East!"

"Somewhat pompous claims," said Smith, and he blew away all that pseudo-scientific rubbish in a few dry sentences. Smith knew it was no good sitting in a laboratory, with no matter how many guinea-pigs and what an array of fine syringes, simply to peer at the spleens and livers of more or less odoriferous cows. He was an experimenter; he must study the living disease; be there while the cows kicked their last quivering spasms; he must follow nature. He began to get ready for the summer of 1889, when, one day, Kilborne told him of the cattlemen's ridiculous theory about the ticks.