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friends he must have had! For every evening they sat there in the dusk, barelegged with their trousers rolled up to their knees, bare-armed with their shirt sleeves rolled up to their elbows. Some of these friends, whom the anopheles relished particularly, were stabbed every night fifty or sixty times! So Grassi demolished Robert Koch, and so he proved his point, because, though the baby anopheles were children of mother mosquitoes who came from the most pestiferous malaria holes in Italy, not one of Grassi's friends had a sign of malaria!

"It is not the mosquito's children, but only the mosquito who herself bites a malaria sufferer—it is only that mosquito who can give malaria to healthy people!" cried Grassi.

Grassi was as persistent as Ronald Ross had been erratic. He plugged up every little hole in his theory that anopheles is the one special and particular mosquito to bring malaria to men. By a hundred air-tight experiments he proved the malaria of birds could not be carried by the mosquitoes who brought it to men and that the malaria of men could never be strewn abroad by the mosquitoes who brought it to birds. Nothing was too much trouble for this Battista Grassi! He knew as much about the habits and customs and traditions of those zanzarone as if he himself were a mosquito and the king and ruler of mosquitoes. . . .

What is more, Battista Grassi was a practical man, and as I have said, an excessively patriotic man. He wanted to see his discovery do well by Italy, for he loved his Italy faithfully and violently. His experiments were no sooner finished, the last good strong nail was no sooner driven into the house of his case against the anopheles, than he began telling people, and writing in newspapers, and preaching—you might almost say he went about, bellowing till he bored everybody:

"Keep away the zanzarone and in a few years Italy will be free from malaria!"