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around that corner, which is why this history has to stop with Paul Ehrlich.

Of course, it is sure as the sun following the dawn of tomorrow, that the high deeds of the microbe hunters have not come to an end; there will be others to fashion magic bullets. And they will be waggish men and original, like Paul Ehrlich, for it is not from a mere combination of incessant work and magnificent laboratories that such marvelous cures are to be got. . . . To-day? Well, to-day there are no microbe hunters who look you solemnly in the eye and tell you that two plus two makes five. Paul Ehrlich was that kind of a man. Born in March of 1854 in Silesia in Germany, he went to the gymnasium at Breslau, and his teacher of literature ordered him to write an essay, subject: "Life is a Dream."

"Life rests on normal oxidations," wrote that bright young Jew, Paul Ehrlich. "Dreams are an activity of the brain and the activities of the brain are only oxidations . . . dreams are a sort of phosphorescence of the brain!"

He got a bad mark for such smartness, but then he was always getting bad marks. Out of the gymnasium, he went to a medical school, or rather, to three or four medical schools―Ehrlich was that kind of a medical student. It was the opinion of the distinguished medical faculties of Breslau and Strasbourg and Freiburg and Leipsic that he was no ordinary student. It was also their opinion he was an abominably bad student, which meant that Paul Ehrlich refused to memorize the ten thousand and fifty long words supposed to be needed for the cure of sick patients. He was a revolutionist, he was part of the revolt led by that chemist, Louis Pasteur, and the country doctor, Robert Koch. His professors told Paul Ehrlich to cut up dead bodies and learn the parts of dead bodies; instead he cut up one part of a dead body into very thin slices and set to work to paint these slices with an amazing variety of pretty-colored aniline dyes, bought, borrowed, stolen from under his demonstrator's nose.

He hadn't a notion of why he liked to do that―though there