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years passed, and, when the Indian Medical Service failed to recognize his various abilities, Ronald Ross cried: "Why work?"

He went back to England on his first furlough in 1888, and there something happened to him, an event that is often an antidote to cynicism and a regulator of confused multitudinous ambitions. He met, he was smitten with, and presently he married Miss Rosa Bloxam. Back in India—though he wrote another novel called "Child of Ocean" and invented systems of shorthand and devised phonetic spellings for the writing of verse and was elected secretary of the Golf Club—he began to fumble at his proper work. In short he began to turn a microscope, with which he was no expert, on to the blood of malarious Hindus. The bizarre, many-formed malaria microbe had been discovered long ago in 1880 by a French army surgeon, Laveran, and Ronald Ross, who was as original as he was energetic and never did anything the way anybody else did it, tried to find this malaria germ by methods of his own.

Of course, he failed again. He bribed, begged, and wheedled drops of blood out of the fingers of hundreds of aguey East Indians. He peered. He found nothing. "Laveran is certainly wrong! There is no germ of malaria!" said Ronald Ross, and he wrote four papers trying to prove that malaria was due to intestinal disturbances. That was his start in microbe hunting!

He went back to London in 1894, plotting to throw up medicine and science. He was thirty-six. "Everything I had tried had failed," he wrote, but he consoled himself by imagining himself a sad defiant lone wolf: "But my failure did not depress me. . . . it drove me aloft to peaks of solitude. . . . Such a spirit was a selfish spirit but nevertheless a high one. It desired nothing, it sought no praise. . . . it had no friends, no fears, no loves, no hates."