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PAUL EHRLICH

and yellow from that one, but the beastly finned trypanosomes of the mal de Caderas swarmed gayly in their veins, and killed those mice, one hundred out of every hundred!

That man Ehrlich smoked more of his imported cigars, even at night in bed he would awake to smoke them; he drank more mineral water; he read in more books, and he threw books at the head of poor Kadereit—who heaven knows could not be blamed for not knowing what dye would kill trypanosomes. He said Latin phrases; he propounded amazing theories of what these dyes ought to do. Never had any searcher coined so many utterly wrong theories. But then, in 1903, came a day when one of these wrong explanations came to help him.

Ehrlich was testing the pretty-colored but complicated benzopurpurin dyes on dying mice, but the mice were dying, with sickening regularity, from the mal de Caderas. Paul Ehrlich wrinkled his forehead—already it was like a corrugated iron roof from the perplexities and failures of twenty years—and he told Shiga:

"These dyes do not spread enough through the mouse's body! Maybe, my dear Shiga, if we change it a little—maybe, let us say, if we added sulfo-groups to this dye, it would dissolve better in the blood of the mouse!" Paul Ehrlich wrinkled his brow.

Now, while Paul Ehrlich's head was an encyclopedia of chemical knowledge, his hands were not the hands of an expert chemist. He hated complicated apparatus as much as he loved complicated theories. He didn't know how to manage apparatus. he was only a chemical dabber making endless fussy little starts with test-tubes, dumping in first this and then that to change the color of a dye, rushing out of his room to show the first person he met the result, waving the test-tube at him, shouting: "You understand? This is splen-did!" but as for delicate syntheses, those subtle buildings-up and changings of dyes, that was work for the master chemists. "But we must change this dye a little—then it will work!" he cried. Now Paul Ehrlich was a gay man and a most charming one, and pres-