Page:Microbe Hunters.djvu/364

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Antony Leeuwenhoek, who was a matter-of-fact man, looked through a magic eye, saw microbes, and so began this history. He would certainly have snorted a contemptuous Dutch sort of snort at anybody who called his microscope a magic eye.

Now Paul Ehrlich―who brings this history to the happy end necessary to all serious histories―was a gay man. He smoked twenty-five cigars a day; he was fond of drinking a seidel of beer (publicly) with his old laboratory servant and many seidels of beer with German, English and American colleagues; a modern man, there was still something medieval about him for he said: "We must learn to shoot microbes with magic bullets." He was laughed at for saying that, and his enemies cartooned him under the name "Doktor Phantasus."

But he did make a magic bullet! Alchemist that he was, he did something more outlandish than that, for he changed a drug that is the favorite poison of murderers into a saver of the lives of men. Out of arsenic he concocted a deliverer from the scourge of that pale corkscrew microbe whose attack is the reward of sin, whose bite is the cause of syphilis, the ill of the loathsome name. Paul Ehrlich had a most weird and wrong-headed and unscientific imagination: that helped him to make microbe hunters turn another corner, though alas, there have been few of them who have known what to do when they got