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mittees, and you can feel his dreams of medals and banquets and the hosannahs of multitudes. . . .

He must grab the discovery for England. He tried gray mosquitoes and green and brown and dappled-winged mosquitoes on Hindus rotten with malaria—but it was no go! He became sleepless and lost eleven pounds. He forgot things. He could not repeat even those first crude experiments at Secunderababad.

And yet—all honor to Ronald Ross. He did marvelous things in spite of himself. It was his travail that helped the learned, the expert, the indignant Battista Grassi to do those clean superb experiments that must end in wiping malaria from the earth.

You might know Giovanni Battista Grassi would be the man to do what Ronald Ross had not quite succeeded in bringing off. He had been educated for a doctor, at Pavia where that glittering Spallanzani had held forth amid applause a hundred years before. Grassi had been educated for a doctor (Heaven knows why) because he had no sooner got his license than he set himself up in business as a searcher in zoölogy. With a certain amount of sniffishness he always insisted: "I am a zoologo—not a medico!" Deliberate as a glacier, precise as a ship's chronometer, he started finding answers to the puzzles of nature. Correct answers! His works were pronounced classics right after he published them—but it was his habit not to publish them for years after he started to do them. He made known the secret comings and goings of the Society of the White Ants—not only this, but he discovered microbes that plagued and preyed upon these white ants. He knew more than any man in the world about eels—and you may believe it took a searcher with the insight of a Spallanzani to trace out the weird and romantic changes that eels undergo to fulfill their destiny as eels. Grassi was not strong. He had abomi-