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fighters like Bruce! There was something diabolical in the risks he took, and something yet more devilish in the way he could laugh—with a dry humor—and wish other microbe hunters might have died to prove some of his own theories. But he had a right to wish death for others—
"Can young tsetse flies, bred in the laboratory, inherit the sleeping-sickness trypanosome from their mothers? Surely there was a chance of it (you remember that strange business of Theobald Smith's mother-ticks bequeathing the Texas fever microbe to their children). But analogies are for philosophers and lawyers. "Are artificially hatched young tsetses dangerous?" asks Bruce. "No!" he can answer. "For two members of the commission" [modestly he does not say which two members] "allowed hundreds of tsetse flies, bred in the laboratory, to bite them. And the result was negative."
But no man knew what the result would be—before he tried. And the deaths from sleeping sickness (according to the best figures) are one hundred out of one hundred. . . .
How he enjoyed hearing of other men trying to kill themselves to find out! His last African foray was in 1911—he stayed until 1914. He was near sixty; his blacksmith's strength was beginning to crack from a nasty infection of his air-tubes got from I know not what drenching rains or chills of high tropic nights. But a new form of sleeping sickness—terrible stuff that killed in a few months instead of years—had just broken out in Nyassaland and Rhodesia. There was a great scientific quarrel on. Was the trypanosome causing this disease some new beast just out of the womb of Nature—or was it nothing else than Bruce's old parasite of nagana, tired of butchering only cows, dogs and horses, and now learning to kill men?
Bruce went to work at it. A German in Portuguese East Africa said: "This trypanosome is a new kind of bug!" Bruce retorted: "On the contrary, it is nothing but the nagana germ hopping from cows to men."
Then this German, his name was Taute, took the blood of an