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ous? Atoxyl had almost cured mice with sleeping sickness. Atoxyl had killed mice without sleeping sickness. Atoxyl had been tried on those poor darkies down in Africa. It had not cured them, but an altogether embarrassing number of those darkies had gone blind, stone blind, from Atoxyl before they had had time to die from sleeping sickness. So, you see, this Atoxyl was a sinister medicine that its inventors—had they been living—should have been ashamed of. It was made of a benzene ring, which is nothing more than six atoms of carbon chasing themselves round in a circle like a dog running round biting the end of his tail, and four atoms of hydrogen, and some ammonia and the oxide of arsenic—which everybody knows is poisonous.

"We will change it a little," said Paul Ehrlich, though he knew the chemists who had invented Atoxyl had said it was so built that it couldn't be changed without spoiling it. But every afternoon Ehrlich fussed around alone in his chemical laboratory, which was like no other chemical laboratory in the world. It had no retorts, no beakers, no flasks nor thermometers nor ovens—no, not even a balance! It was crude as the prescription counter of the country druggist (who also runs the postoffice) excepting that in its middle stood a huge table, with ranks and ranks of bottles—bottles with labels and bottles without, bottles with scrawled unreadable labels and bottles whose purple contents had slopped all over the labels. But that man's memory remembered what was in every one of those bottles! From the middle of this jungle of bottles a single Bunsen burner reared its head and spouted a blue flame. What chemist would not laugh at this laboratory?

Here Paul Ehrlich dabbled with Atoxyl, shouting: "Splen-did!", growling: "Un-be-liev-a-ble!", dictating to the long-suffering Miss Marquardt, bawling for the indispensable Kadereit. In that laboratory, with a chemical cunning the gods sometimes bestow on searchers who could never be chemists, Paul Ehrlich found that you can change Atoxyl, not a little but a lot, that it can be built into heaven knows how many entirely