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THE MAGIC BULLET
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fluid from these ugly sores. Against the blackness of the dark field of this special microscope, gleaming in a powerful beam of light that hit them sidewise, shooting backwards and forwards like ten thousand silver drills and augers, played myriads of these pale spirochetes. It was a pretty picture, to hold you there for hours, but it was sinister—for what living things can bring worse plague and sorrow to men?

Hata leaned aside. Paul Ehrlich looked down the shiny tube. Then he looked at Hata, and then at the rabbit.

"Make the injection,” said Paul Ehrlich. And into the ear- vein of that rabbit went the clear yellow fluid of the solution of 606, for the first time to do battle with the disease of the loathsome name.

Next day there was not one of those spiral devils to be found in the scrotum of that rabbit. His ulcers? They were drying already! Good clean scabs were forming on them. In less than a month there was nothing to be seen but tiny scabs—it was like a cure of Bible times—no less! And a little while after that Paul Ehrlich could write:

"It is evident from these experiments that, if a large enough dose is given, the spirochetes can be destroyed absolutely and immediately with a single injection!"

This was Paul Ehrlich's day of days. This was the magic bullet! And what a safe bullet! Of course there was no danger in it—look at all these cured rabbits! They had never turned a hair when Hata shot into their ear-veins doses of 606 three times as big as the amount that surely and promptly cured them. It was more marvelous than his dreams, which all searchers in Germany had smiled at. Now he would laugh! "It is safe!" shouted Paul Ehrlich, and you can guess what visions floated into that too confident man's imagination. "It is safe—perfectly safe!" he assured every one. But at night, sitting in the almost unbreathable fog of cigar smoke in his study, alone, among those piles of books and journals that heaped up fantastic shadows round him, sitting there before the pads of blue and green and yellow and orange note paper