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suffer from malaria—but we are not bothered by mosquitoes!" Battista Grassi would never take his word for that. He snouted into pails and old crocks in the back yards. He peered beneath tables and behind sacred images and under beds. He even discovered mosquitoes hiding in shoes under those beds. . . .

So it was—it is most fantastical—that Battista Grassi went more than two-thirds of the way to solving this puzzle of how malaria gets from sick men to healthy ones before he had ever made a single experiment in his laboratory! For, everywhere where there was malaria, there were mosquitoes. And such mosquitoes! They were certainly a very special definite sort of blood-sucking mosquito Grassi found.

"Zan-za-ro-ne, we call that kind of mosquito," the householders told him.

Always, where the "zan-za-ro-ne" buzzed, there Grassi found deep flushed faces on rumpled beds, or faces with chattering teeth going towards those beds. Always where that special and definite mosquito sang at twilight, Grassi found fields waiting for some one to till them, and from the houses of the little villages that sat in these fields, he saw processions emerging, and long black boxes. . . .

There was no mistaking this mosquito, zanzarone, once you had spotted her; she was a frivolous gnat that flew up from the marshes towards the lights of the towns; she was an elegant mosquito proud of four dark spots on her light brown wings; she was not a too dignified insect who sat in an odd way with the tail-end of her body sticking up in the air [that was one way he could spot her, for the Culex mosquitoes drooped their tails]; she was a brave blood-sucker who thought: "The bigger they are the more blood I get out of them!" So zanzarone preferred horses to men and men to rabbits. That was zanzarone, and the naturalists had given her the name Anopheles claviger many years before. Anopheles claviger! This became the slogan of Battista Grassi. You can see him, shuffling along behind lovers in the dusk, making fists of his fingers to keep himself from pouncing on the zanzarone who made