Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/318

his blood, the bigger those circles should grow . . . if they are alive, they must grow!"

Ross fidgeted about—and how he could fidget!—waiting for the next day, that would be the fifth day after his little flock of mosquitoes had fed on Husein under the net. That was the day for the cutting up of the last mosquito of the flock. Came the twenty-first of August. "I killed my last mosquito,” Ronald Ross wrote to Manson, “and rushed at his stomach!"

Yes! Here they were again, those circle cells, one . . . two . . . six . . . twenty of them. . . . They were full of the same jet-black dots. . . . Sure enough! They were bigger than the circles in the mosquito of the day before. . . . They were really growing! They must be the malaria parasites growing! (Though there was no absolutely necessary reason they must be.) But they must be! Those circles with their black dots in the bellies of three measly mosquitoes now kicked Ronald Ross up to heights of exultation. He must write verses!

At least that is what Ronald Ross, in those memoirs of his, says he wrote on the night of the day of his first little success. But to Manson, telling the finest details about the circles with their jet-black dots, he only said:

"The hunt is up again. It may be a false scent, but it smells promising."

And in a scientific paper, sent off to England to the British Medical Journal, Ronald Ross wrote gravely like any cool searcher. He wrote admitting he had not taken pains to study his brown mosquitoes carefully. He admitted the jet-black