Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/325
that this meant malaria would be wiped out from to-morrow on and forever—for what is simpler than to kill mosquitoes? So that congress permitted itself a furore.
But Patrick Manson was not so sure: "One can object that the facts determined for birds do not hold, necessarily, for men." He was right. There was the rub. This was what Ronald Ross seemed to forget: that nature is everlastingly full of surprises and annoying exceptions, and if there are laws and rules for the movements of the planets, there may be absolutely no apparent rime and less reason for the meanderings of the microbes of malaria. . . . Searchers, the best of them, still do no more than scratch the surface of the most amazing mysteries, all they can do (yet!) to find truth about microbes is to hunt, hunt endlessly. . . . There are no laws!
So Patrick Manson was stern with Ronald Ross. This nervous man, feeling he could stand this cursed India not one moment longer, must stand it months longer, years longer! He had made a brilliant beginning, but only a beginning. He must keep on, if not for science, or for himself, then for England! For England! And in October Manson wrote him: "I hear Koch has failed with the mosquito in Italy, so you have time to grab the discovery for England."
But Ronald Ross—alas—could not grab that discovery of human malaria, not for science, nor humanity, nor for England—nor (what was worst) for himself. He had come to the end of his rope. And among all microbe hunters, there is for me no more tortured man than this same Ronald Ross. There have been searchers who have failed—they have kept on hunting with the naturalness of ducks swimming; there have been searchers who have succeeded gloriously—but they were hunters born, and they kept on hunting in spite of the seductions of glory. But Ross! Here was a man who could only do patient experiments—with a tragic impatience, in agony, against the clamoring of his instincts that yelled against the priceless loneliness that is the one condition for all true searching. He had visions of himself at the head of important com-