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other microbe hunters, who read nature and not books. But Paul Ehrlich was not that kind of man! He rarely observed nature, unless it was the pet toad in his garden, whose activities helped Ehrlich to prophesy the weather—it was Mr. Kadereit's first duty to bring plenty of flies to that toad. . . . No, Paul Ehrlich got his ideas out of books.

He lived among scientific books and subscribed to every chemical journal in every language he could read, and in several he couldn't read. Books littered his laboratory so that when visitors came and Ehrlich said: "I beg you, be seated!" there was no place for them to sit at all. Journals stuck out of the pockets of his overcoat—when he remembered to wear one—and the maid, bringing his coffee in the morning, fell over ever-growing mountains of books in his bedroom. Books, with the help of those expensive cigars, kept Paul Ehrlich poor. Mice built nests in the vast piles of books on the old sofa in his office. When he wasn't painting the insides of his animals and the outside of himself with his dyes, he was peering in these books. And what was important inside of those books, was in the brain of Paul Ehrlich, ripening, changing itself into those outlandish ideas of his, waiting to be used. That was where Paul Ehrlich got his ideas—you would never accuse him of stealing the ideas of others!—and queer things happened to those ideas of others when they stewed in Ehrlich's brain.

So now, in 1901, at the beginning of his eight-year search for the magic bullet he read of the researches of Alphonse Laveran. Laveran was the man, you remember, who discovered the malaria microbe, and very lately Laveran had taken to fussing with trypanosomes. He had shot those finned devils, which do evil things to the hind-quarters of horses and give them a disease called the mal de Caderas, into mice. Laveran had watched those trypanosomes kill those mice, one hundred times out of one hundred. Then Laveran had injected arsenic under the skins of some of those suffering mice. That had helped thema little, and killed many of the trypanosomes that