Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/335

He became a fanatic on the best ways to kill anopheles: he was indignant (that man had no sense of humor!) because townspeople insisted on strolling through their streets in the dusk. "How can you be so foolish as to walk in the twilight?" Grassi asked them. "That is the very time when the malaria mosquito is waiting for you."

He was the very type of the silly sanitarian. "Don't go out in the warm evenings," he told every one, "unless you wear heavy cotton gloves and veils!" (Imagine young Italians making love in heavy cotton gloves and veils.) So there was a good deal of sniggering at this professor who had become a violent missionary against the zanzarone.

But Battista Grassi was a practical man! "One family, staying free from the tortures of malaria—that would be worth ten years of preaching—I’ll have to show them!" he muttered. So, in 1900, after his grinding experiments of 1898 and '99, this tough man set out to "show them." He went down into the worst malaria region of Italy, along the railroad line that ran through the plain of Capaccio. It was high summer. It was deadly summer there, and every summer the poor wretches of railroad workers, miserable farmers whose blood was gutted by the malaria poison, would leave that plain, at the cost of their jobs, at the cost of food, at the risk of starvation—to the hills to flee the malaria. And every summer from the swamps at twilight swarmed the malignant hosts of female zanzarone; at each hot dusk they made their meals and did their murders, and in the night, bellies full of blood, they sang back to their marshes, to marry and lay eggs and hatch out thousands more of their kind.

In the summer of 1900 Battista Grassi went to the plain of Capaccio. The hot days were just beginning, the anopheles were on the march. In the windows and on the doors of ten little houses of station-masters and employees of the railroad Grassi put up wire screens, so fine-meshed and so perfect that the slickest and the slightest of the zanzarone could not slip through them. Then Grassi, armed with authority from the