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they teach there are for the purpose of getting money through knowledge or for gaining the respect of the world by showing people how learned you are, and these things have nothing to do with discovering the things that are buried from our eyes. I am convinced that of a thousand people not one is capable of carrying out such studies, because endless time is needed and much money is spilled and because a man has always to be busy with his thoughts if anything is to be accomplished. . . ."

That was the first of the microbe hunters. In 1723, when he was ninety-one years old and on his deathbed, he sent for his friend Hoogvliet. He could not lift his hand. His once glowing eyes were rheumy and their lids were beginning to stick fast with the cement of death. He mumbled:

"Hoogvliet, my friend, be so good as to have those two letters on the table translated into Latin. . . . Send them to London to the Royal Society. . . ."

So he kept his promise made fifty years before, and Hoogvliet wrote, along with those last letters: "I send you, learned sirs, this last gift of my dying friend, hoping that his final word will be agreeable to you."

So he passed, this first of the microbe hunters. You will read of Spallanzani, who was much more brilliant, of Pasteur who had a thousand times his imagination, of Robert Koch who did much more immediate apparent good in lifting the torments that microbes bring to men—these and all the others have much more fame to-day. But not one of them has been so completely honest, so appallingly accurate as this Dutch janitor, and all of them could take lessons from his splendid common sense.