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MALARIA
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way, he took those brown mosquitoes (which may have bitten other beasts, who knows) and loosed them out of their bottles under the net. They sucked the blood of Husein Khan, at a few cents per suck per mosquito, and then once more, one day after another, Ross peeped at the stomachs of those insects.

On the nineteenth of August he had only three of the brown beasts left. He cut one of them up. Hopelessly he began to look at the walls of its stomach, with its pretty, regular cells arranged like stones in a paved road. Mechanically he peered down the tube of his microscope, when suddenly something queer forced itself up into the front of his attention.

What was this? In the midst of the even pavement of the cells of the stomach wall lay a funny circular thing, about a twenty-five-hundredth of an inch its diameter was—here was another! But, curse it! It was hot—he stopped looking. . . .

The next day it was the same. Here, in the wall of the stomach of the next to the last mosquito, four days after it had sucked the blood of the unhappy malarious Husein Khan, here were those same circular outlines—clear—much more distinct than the outlines of the cells of the stomach, and in each one of these circles was "a cluster of small granules, black as jet!" Here was another of those fantastic things, and another—he counted twelve in all. He yawned. It was hot. That black pigment looked a lot like the black pigment inside of malaria microbes in the blood of human bodies—but it was hot. Ross yawned, and went home for a nap.

And as he awoke—so he says in his memoirs—a thought struck him: "Those circles in the wall of the stomach of the mosquito—those circles with their dots of black pigment, they can't be anything else than the malaria parasite, growing there. . . . That black pigment is just like the specks of black pigment in the microbes in the blood of Husein Khan. . . . The longer I wait to kill my mosquitoes after they have sucked