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gnawed at them, but not one of these mice ever got really better; one hundred out of one hundred died and that was as far as Alphonse Laveran ever got.

But reading this was enough to get Ehrlich started. "Ho! here is an excellent microbe to work with! It is large and easy to see. It is easy to grow in mice. It kills them with the most beautiful regularity! It always kills mice! What could be a better microbe than this trypanosome to use to try to find a magic bullet to cure? Because, if I could find a dye that would save, completely save, just one mouse!"

So Paul Ehrlich, in 1902, set out on his hunt. He got out his entire array of gleaming and glittering and shimmering dyes. "Splen-did!" he cried as he squatted before cupboards holding an astounding mosaic of sloppy bottles. He provided himself with plenty of the healthiest mice. He got himself a most earnest and diligent Japanese doctor, Shiga, to do the patient job of watching those mice, of snipping a bit off the ends of their tails to get a drop of blood to look for the trypanosomes, of snipping another bit off the ends of the same tails to get a drop of blood to inject into the next mouse—to do the job, in short, that it takes the industry and patience of a Japanese to do. The evil trypanosomes of the mal de Caderas came in a doomed guinea-pig from the Pasteur Institute in Paris; into the first mouse they went, and the hunt was on.

They tried nearly five hundred dyes! What a completely unscientific hunter Paul Ehrlich was! It was like the first boatman hunting for the right kind of wood from which to make stout oars; it was like primitive blacksmiths clawing among metals for the best stuff from which to forge swords. It was, in short, the oldest of all the ways of man to get knowledge. It was the method of Trial and Sweating! Ehrlich tried; Shiga sweat. Their mice turned blue from this dye