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But as you will see, Ronald Ross knew nothing of himself, for when he got going at his proper work, there was never a less calm and more desirous spirit than his. Nor a more enthusiastic one. And how he could hate!
When Ross returned to London he met Patrick Manson, an eminent and mildly famous English doctor. Manson had got himself medically notorious by discovering that mosquitoes can suck worms out of the blood of Chinamen (he had practiced in Shanghai); Manson had proved—this is remarkable!—that these worms can even develop in the stomachs of mosquitoes. Manson was obsessed by mosquitoes, he believed they were among the peculiar creatures of God, he was convinced they were important to the destinies of man, he was laughed at, and the medical wiseacres of Harley Street called him a "pathological Jules Verne." He was sneered at. And then he met Ronald Ross—whom the world had sneered at. What a pair of men these two were! Manson knew so little about mosquitoes that he believed they could only suck blood once in their lives, and Ross talked vaguely about mosquitoes and gnats not knowing that mosquitoes were gnats. And yet—
Manson took Ross to his office, and there he set Ross right about the malaria microbe of Laveran that Ross did not believe in. He showed Ronald Ross the pale malaria parasites, peppered with a blackish pigment. Together they watched these germs, fished out of the blood of sailors just back from the equator, turn into little squads of spheres inside the red blood cells, then burst out the blood cells. "That happens just when the man has his chill,” explained Manson. Ross was amazed at the mysterious transformations and cavortings of the malaria germs in the blood. After those spheres had galloped out of the corpuscles, they turned suddenly into crescent shapes, then those crescents would shoot out two, three, four, sometimes six long whips, which lashed and curled about and made the beast look like a microscopic octopus.
"That, Ross, is the parasite of malaria—you never find it in