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They went, those microbes, to the spit-gland of those mosquitoes!
Squinting through his lens at a wart on the wall of the stomach of a she-mosquito, seven days after she had made a meal from the blood of a malarious bird, Ronald Ross saw that wart burst open! He saw a great regiment of weird spindle-shaped threads march out of that wart. He watched them swarm through the whole body of that she-mosquito. He pawed around in countless she-mosquitoes who had fed on malarious birds. He watched other circles grow into warts, get ripe, burst, shoot out those spindles. He pried through his lens at the "million things that go to make up a mosquito"—he hadn’t the faintest notion what to call most of them—until one day, strangest of acts of malignant nature, he saw those regiments of spindle-threads, which had teemed in the body of the mosquito, march to her spit-gland.
In that spit-gland, feebly, lazily moving in it, but swarming in such myriads that they made it quiver, almost, under his lens, were those regiments and armies of spindle-shaped threads, hopeful valiant young microbes of malaria, ready to march up the tube to the mosquito's stinger. . . .
"It's by the bite mosquitoes carry malaria then," Ross whispered—he whispered it because that was contrary to the theory of his scientific father, Patrick Manson. "It is all nonsense that birds—or people either—get malaria by drinking dead mosquitoes, or by inhaling the dust of mosquitoes. . . ." Ronald Ross had always been loyal to Patrick Manson. But now! Never has there been a finer instance of wrong theories leading a microbe hunter to unsuspected facts. But now! Ronald Ross needed no help. He was a searcher.
"It's by the bite!" shouted Ronald Ross, so, on the twenty-fifth day of June in 1898, Mr. Mahomed Bux brought in three perfectly healthy sparrows—fine sparrows with not a single microbe of malaria in their blood. That night, and night after night after that night, with Ronald Ross watching, Mr. Mahomed Bux let into the cage with those healthy sparrows a