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nable eyesight. He was full of an argumentative petulance. He was a contradictory combination of a man too modest to want his picture in the papers but bawling at the same time for the last jot and tittle of credit for everything that he did. And he did everything. Already, when he was only twenty-nine, before Ross had dreamt of becoming a searcher, Battista Grassi was a professor, and had published his famous monograph upon the Chaetognatha (I do not know what they are!).

Before Ronald Ross knew that anybody had ever thought of mosquitoes carrying malaria, Grassi had had the idea, had taken a whirl at experiments on it, but had used the wrong mosquito, and failed. But that failure started ideas stewing in his head while he worked at other things—and how he worked! Grassi detested people who didn’t work. "Mankind," he said, "is composed of those who work, those who pretend to work, and those who do neither." He was ready to admit that he belonged in the first class, and it is entirely certain that he did belong there.

In 1898, the year of the triumph of Ronald Ross, Grassi, knowing nothing of Ross, never having heard of Ross, went back at malaria again. "Malaria is the worst problem Italy has to face! It desolates our richest farms! It attacks millions in our lush lowlands! Why don’t you solve that problem?" So the politicians, to Battista Grassi. Then too, the air was full of whispers of the possibility that I don't know how many different diseases might be carried from man to man by insects. There was that famous work of Theobald Smith, and Grassi had an immense respect for Theobald Smith. But what probably finally set Grassi working at malaria—you must remember he was a very patriotic and jealous man—was the arrival of Robert Koch. Dean of the microbe hunters of the world, Tsar of Science (his crown was only a little battered) Koch had come to Italy to prove that mosquitoes carry malaria from man to man.

Koch was an extremely grumpy, quiet, and restless man now; sad because of the affair of his consumption cure (which