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Such was the fight of Ronald Ross and Battista Grassi against the assassins of the red blood corpuscles, the sappers of vigorous life, the destroyer of men, the chief scourge of the lands of the South—the microbe of malaria. There were aftermaths of this fight, some of them too long to tell, and some too painful. There were good aftermaths and bad ones. There are fertile fields now, and healthy babies, in Italy and Africa and India and America, where once the hum of the anopheles brought thin blood and chattering teeth, brought desolate land and death.

There is the Panama Canal. . . .

Then there is Sir Ronald Ross, who was—as once he hoped and dreamed—given enthusiastic banquets.

There is Ronald Ross who got the Nobel Prize of seven thousand eight hundred and eighty pounds sterling for his discovery of how the gray mosquito carries malaria to birds. . . .

There is Battista Grassi who didn't get the Nobel Prize, and is now unknown, except in Italy, where they huzzahed for him and made him a Senator (he never missed a meeting of that Senate to within a year of his death).

All these are, for the most part, good, even if some of them are slightly ironical aftermaths.

Then there is Ronald Ross, who had learned the hard game of searching while he made his discovery about the gray mosquito—you would say his best years of work were just beginning—there is Ronald Ross, insinuating Grassi was a thief, hinting that Grassi was a charlatan, saying Grassi had added almost nothing to the proof that mosquitoes carry malaria to men!

There was Grassi—justifiably purple with indignation, writing violent papers in reply. . . . You cannot blame him! But why will such searchers scuffle, when there are so many things left to find? You would think—of course it would be so in a novel—that they could have ignored each other, or could have