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scores, by hundreds, every day—the only thing to do was to get up and get out of that town. Because the yellow murderer had a way of crawling through walls and slithering along the ground and popping around corners—it could even pass through fires!—it could die and rise from the dead, that yellow murderer; and after everybody (including the very best physicians) had fought it by doing as many contrary things as they could think of as frantically as they could do them—the yellow jack kept on killing, until suddenly it got fed up with killing. In North America that always came with the frosts in the fall. . . .

This was the state of scientific knowledge about yellow fever up to the year 1900. But from between his mutton chop whiskers Carlos Finlay of Habana howled in a scornful wilderness: "You are all wrong—yellow fever is caused by a mosquito!"

There was a bad state of affairs in San Cristobal de Habana in Cuba in 1900. The yellow jack had killed thousands more American soldiers than the bullets of the Spaniards had killed. And it wasn't like most diseases, which considerately pounce upon poor dirty people—it had killed more than one-third of the officers of General Leonard Wood's staff, and staff officers—as all soldiers know—are the cleanest of all officers and the best protected. General Wood had thundered orders; Habana had been scrubbed; happy dirty Cubans had been made into unhappy clean Cubans—"No stone had been left unturned"—in vain! There was more yellow fever in Habana than there had been in twenty years!

Cablegrams from Habana to Washington and on June 25th of 1900 Major Walter Reed came to Quemados in Cuba with orders to "give special attention to questions relating to the cause and prevention of yellow fever." It was a big order. Considering who the man Walter Reed was, it was altogether too big an order. Pasteur had tried it! Of course, in certain ways—though you would say they had nothing to do with