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So passed two years, until, in June of 1897 Ronald Ross came back to Secunderabad, to the steamy hospital of Begumpett. The monsoon bringing its cool rain should have already broken, but it had not. A hellish wind blew gritty clouds of dust into the laboratory of Ronald Ross. He wanted to throw his microscope out of the window. Its one remaining eyepiece was cracked, and its metal work was rusted with his sweat. There was the punka, the blessed punka, but he could not start the punka going because it blew his dead mosquitoes away, and in the evening when the choking wind had died, the dust still hid the sun in a dreadful haze. Ronald Ross wrote:

And that relieved him and released him, just as another man might escape by whiskey or by playing bottle-pool, and on the sixteenth of August he decided to begin his work all over, to start, in short, where he had begun in 1895—"only much more thoroughly this time." So he stripped his malaria patient—it was the famous Husein Khan. Under the mosquito net went Husein, for Ronald Ross had found a new kind of mosquito with which to plague this Husein Khan, and in his unscientific classification Ross called this mosquito, simply, a brown mosquito. (For the purposes of historical accuracy, and to be fair to Battista Grassi, I must state that it is not clear where these brown mosquitoes came from. In the early part of his report Ronald Ross says he raised them from the grubs—but a moment later, speaking of a closely related mosquito, he says: "I have failed in finding their grubs also.")

It is no wonder—though lamentable for the purposes of history—that Ronald Ross was mixed up, considering his lone-wolf work and that hot wind and his perpetual failures! Any-