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Ross had not given him hints. So there is no doubt they helped each other, but unhappily for the Dignity of Science, before the huzzahs of the rescued populations had died away, Battista Grassi and Ronald Ross were in each other's hair on the question of who did how much. It was deplorable. To listen to these two, you would think each would rather this noble discovery had remained buried, than have the other get a mite of credit for it. Indeed, the only consolation to be got from this scientific brawl—aside from the saving of human lives—is the knowledge that microbe hunters are men like the rest of us, and not stuffed shirts or sacred cows, as certain historians would have us believe. They sat there, Battista Grassi and Ronald Ross, indignant co-workers in a glorious job, in the midst of their triumph, with figurative torn collars and metaphorical scratched faces. Like two quarrelsome small boys they sat there.

For the first thirty-five years of his life Ronald Ross tried his best not to be a microbe hunter. He was born in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, and knowing his father (if you believe in eugenics) you might suspect that Ronald Ross would do topsy-turvy things with his life. Father Ross was a ferocious looking border-fighting English general with belligerent side-whiskers, who was fond of battles but preferred to paint landscapes. He shipped his son Ronald Ross back to England before he was ten, and presently, before he was twenty, Ronald was making a not too enthusiastic pass at studying medicine, failing to pass his examinations because he preferred composing music to the learning of Latin words and the cultivation of the bedside manner. This was in the eighteen-seventies, mind you, in the midst of the most spectacular antics of Pasteur, but from the autobiography of Ronald Ross, which is a strange mixture of cleverness and contradiction, of frank abuse of himself and of high enthusiasm