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The last ten years of the nineteenth century were as unfortunate for ticks, bugs, and gnats as they were glorious for the microbe hunters. Theobald Smith had started them off by scotching the ticks that carried Texas fever; a little later and six thousand miles away David Bruce, stumbling through the African bush, got onto the trail of the tsetse fly, accused him, convicted him. How melancholy and lean have been the years, since then, for that murderous tick whose proper name is Bo-ophilus bovis, and you may be sure that since those searchings of David Bruce, the tsetses have had to bootleg for the blood of black natives and white hunters, and missionaries. And now alas for mosquitoes! Malaria must be wiped from the earth. Malaria can be destroyed! Because, by the middle of 1899, two wrangling and not too dignified microbe hunters had proved that the mosquito—and only one particular kind of mosquito—was the criminal in the malaria mystery.

Two men solved that puzzle. The one, Ronald Ross, was a not particularly distinguished officer in the medical service of India. The other, Battista Grassi, was a very distinguished Italian authority on worms, white ants, and the doings of eels. You cannot put one before the other in the order of their merit—Ross would certainly have stopped short of solving the puzzle without Grassi. And Grassi might (though I am not so sure of that!) have muddled for years if the searchings of