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nagana microbes may lurk in game, waiting to be carried to gentler beasts by the tsetse. So it was Bruce made the first step towards the opening up of Africa.

And Hely-Hutchinson saw how right he had been about David Bruce. " 'Ware the tsetse fly," he told his farmers, "kill the tsetse fly, clear the thickets in which it likes to breed—drive out, exterminate the antelope from which it sucks the trypanosomes." So Bruce began ridding Africa of nagana.

Then came the Boer War. Bruce and Mrs. Bruce found themselves besieged in Ladysmith with nine thousand other Englishmen. There were thirty medical officers in the garrison—but not one surgeon. With each whine and burst of the shells from the Boer's "Long Tom" the rows of the wounded grew—there were moanings, and a horrid stench from legs that should be amputated. . . . "Think of it! Not one of those medicoes could handle a knife! Myself, I was only a laboratory man," said Bruce, "but I had cut up plenty of dogs and guinea-pigs and monkeys—so why not soldiers? There was one chap with a bashed-up knee . . . well, they chloroformed him, and while they were at that, I sat in the next room reading Treve's Surgery on how to take out a knee-joint. Then I went in and did it—we saved his leg." So Bruce became Chief Surgeon, and fought and starved, nearly to death, with the rest. What a boy that Bruce was! In 1924 in Toronto, in a hospital as he lay propped up, a battered bronchitic giant, telling me this story, his bright eye belied his skin wrinkled and the color of old parchment—and there was no doubt he was as proud of his slapdash surgery and his sulky battles with the authorities, as of any of his discoveries in microbe hunting. He chuckled through phlegm that gurgled deep in his ancient air-tubes: "Those red-tape fellows—I always had to fight their red-tape—until at last I got too str-r-rong for them!"