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ten gray mosquitoes into a cage containing three larks, and the blood of those larks teemed with the germs of malaria. The ten mosquitoes bit those larks, and filled themselves with lark's blood.
Three days later Ronald Ross could shout: "The microbe of the malaria of birds grows in the wall of the stomach of the gray mosquito—just as the human microbe grew in the wall of the stomach of the brown spot-winged mosquito."
Then he wrote to Patrick Manson. This lunatic Ross became for a moment himself a malaria microbe! That night he wrote these strange words to Patrick Manson:
"I find that I exist constantly in three out of four mosquitoes fed on bird-malaria parasites, and that I increase regularly in size from about a seven-thousandth of an inch after about thirty hours to about one seven-hundredth of an inch after about eighty-five hours. . . . I find myself in large numbers in about one out of two mosquitoes fed on two crows with blood parasites. . . ."
He thought he was himself a circle with those jet-black dots. . . .
"What an ass I have been not to follow your advice before and work with birds!" Ross wrote to Manson. Heaven knows what Ronald Ross would have discovered without that persistent Patrick Manson.
You would think that such a man as Ross, wild as the maddest of hatters, topsy-turvy as the dream of a hasheesh-eater, you would swear, I say, that he could do no accurate experiments. Wrong! For presently he was up to his ears in an experiment Pasteur would have been proud to do.
Mr. Mahomed Bux brought in three sparrows, and one of these sparrows was perfectly healthy, with no malaria microbes in its blood; the second had a few; but the third sparrow was very sick—his blood swarmed with the black-dotted germs. Ross took these three birds and put each one in a separate cage, mosquito-proof. Then the artful Mahomed took a brood of she-mosquitoes, clean, raised from the grubs, free of all