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flock of poisonous she-mosquitoes who had fed on sick birds. . . . And Ronald Ross, fidgety as a father waiting news of his first-born child, biting his mustache, sweating, and sweating more yet because he used up so much of himself cursing at his sweat—Ross watched those messengers of death bite the healthy sparrows. . . .
On the ninth of July Ross wrote to Patrick Manson: "All three birds, perfectly healthy before, are now simply swarming with proteosoma." (Proteosoma are the malarial parasites of birds.)
Now Ronald Ross did anything but live remotely on his mountain top. He wrote this to Manson, he wired it to Manson, he wrote it to Paris to old Alphonse Laveran, the discoverer of the malaria microbe; he sent papers to one scientific journal and two medical journals about it; he told everybody in Calcutta about it; he bragged about it—in short, this Ronald Ross was like a boy who had just made his first kite finding that the kite could really fly. He went wild—and then (it is too bad!) he collapsed. Patrick Manson went to Edinburgh and told the doctors of the great medical congress about the miracle of the sojourn and the growing and the meanderings of the malaria microbes in the bodies of gray she-mosquitoes: he described how his protégé, Ronald Ross, alone, obscure, laughed at, but tenacious, had tracked the germ of malaria from the blood of a bird through the belly and body of she-mosquitoes to their dangerous position in her stinger, ready to be shot into the next bird she bit.
The learned doctors gaped. Then Patrick Manson read out a telegram from Ronald Ross. It was the final proof: the bite of a malarial mosquito had given a healthy bird malaria! The congress—this is the custom of congresses—permitted itself a dignified furore, and passed a resolution congratulating this unknown Major Ronald Ross on his "Great and Epoch-Making Discovery." The congress—it is the habit of congresses—believed that what is true for birds goes for men too. The congress—men in the mass are ever uncritical—thought