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What an incredible pair of searchers they were! Away in London Patrick Manson kept answering Ross's tangled tortured letters, felt his way and gathered hope from his mixed-up accounts of unimportant experiments. "Let mosquitoes bite people sick with malaria," wrote Manson, "then put those mosquitoes in a bottle of water and let them lay eggs and hatch out grubs. Then give that mosquito-water to people to drink. . . ."

So Ross fed some of this malaria-mosquito soup to Lutchman, his servant, and almost danced with excitement as the man's temperature went up—but it was a false alarm, it wasn't malaria, worse luck. . . . So dragged the dreary days, the months, the years, feeding people mashed-up mosquitoes and writing to Manson: "I have a sort of feeling it will succeed—I feel a kind of religious excitement over it!" But it never succeeded. But he kept at it. He intrigued to get to places where he might find more malaria; he discovered strange new mosquitoes and from their bellies he dredged up unheard-of parasites—that had nothing to do with malaria. He tried everything. He was illogical. He was anti-scientific. He was like Edison combing the world to get proper stuff out of which to make phonograph needles. "There is only one method of solution," he wrote, "that is, by incessant trial and exclusion." He wrote that, while the simple method lay right under his hand, unfelt.

He wrote shrieking poems called "Wraths." He was ordered to Bangalore to try to stop the cholera epidemic, and didn't stop it. He became passionate about the Indian authorities. "I wish I might rub their noses in the filth and disease which they so impotently let fester in Hindustan," Ronald Ross cried. But who can blame him? It was hot there. "I was now forty years old," he wrote, "but, though I was well known in India, both for my sanitary work at Bangalore and for my researches on malaria I received no advancement at all for my pains."