Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/314

He bungled. He was like any tyro searcher—only his innate hastiness made him worse—and he was constantly making momentous discoveries that turned out not to be discoveries at all. But his bunglings had fire in them. To read his letters to Patrick Manson, you would think he had made himself miraculously small and crawled under the lens into that blood among the objects he was learning to spy upon. And what was best, everything was a story to him, no, more than a story, a melodrama. Manson had told him to watch those strange whips that grew out of the crescent malaria germs and made them look like octopuses. In vast excitement he wrote a long letter to Manson, telling of a strange fight between a whip that had shaken itself free, and a white blood cell—a phagocyte. He was a vivid man, was Ronald Ross. "He [Ross called that whip "he"] kept poking the phagocyte in the ribs (!) in different parts of his body, until the phagocyte finally turned and ran off howling . . . the fight between the whip and the phagocyte was wonderful. . . . I shall write a novel on it in the style of the 'Three Musketeers.' " That was the way he kept himself at it and got himself past the first ambushes and disappointments of his ignorance and inexperience. He collected malarious Hindus as a terrier collects rats. He loved them if they were shot full of malaria, he detested them when they got better. He gloried in the wretched Abdul Wahab, a dreadful case. He pounced on Abdul and dragged him from pillar to post. He put fleas on him. He tortured him with mosquitoes. He failed. He kept at it. He wrote to Manson: "Please send me advice. . . ." He missed important truths that lay right under his nose—that yelled to be discovered.

But he was beginning to know just exactly what a malaria parasite looked like—he could spot its weird black grains of pigment, and tell them apart from all of the unknown tiny blobs and bubbles and balloons that drifted before his eyes under his lens. And the insides of the stomachs of mosquitoes? They were becoming as familiar as the insides of his nasty hot quarters!