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of Dr. Bastianelli in the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, high up on the top floor of this hospital that sat on a high hill of Rome. Here zanzarone never came. Here nobody ever got malaria. Here was the place for experiments. And here was Mr. Sola, who had never had malaria, every twist and turn of whose health Dr. Bastianelli knew, who told Battista Grassi that he would not mind being shut up with three different brands of hungry she-mosquitoes every night for a month.

Grassi and Bignami and Bastianelli started off, strangely enough, with those two minor mosquito suspects—those two culexes that Grassi had discovered always hanging around malarious places along with the zanzarone. . . . They tortured Mr. Sola each night with hundreds of these mosquitoes. They shut poor Mr. Sola up in that room with those devils and turned off the light. . . .

Nothing happened. Sola was a tough man. Sola showed not a sign of malaria.

(It is not clear why Grassi did not start off by loosing his zanzarone at this Mr. Sola.)

Maybe it was because Robert Koch had laughed publicly at this idea of the zanzarone—Grassi does admit that discourse aged him.

But, one fine morning, Grassi hurried out of Rome to Moletta and came back with a couple of little bottles in which buzzed ten fine female anopheles mosquitoes. That night Mr. Sola had a particularly itchy time of it. Ten days later this stoical old gentleman shook horribly with a chill, his body temperature shot up into a high fever—and his blood swarmed with the microbes of malaria.

"The rest of the history of Sola's case has no interest for us," wrote Grassi, "but it is now certain that mosquitoes can carry malaria, to a place where there are no mosquitoes in nature, to a place where no case of malaria has ever occurred, to a man who has never had malaria—Mr. Sola!"

Over the country went Grassi once more, chasing zanzarone, hoarding zanzarone: in his laboratory he tenderly raised zan-