Koch found his comma bacillus in the dead bodies of every one of the forty carcasses into which he peered, and he unearthed the same microbe in the intestines of patients at the moment the fatal disease hit them. But he never found this germ in any of the hundreds of healthy Hindus that he examined, nor in any animal, from mice to elephants. Quickly Koch learned to grow the comma bacillus pure on beef-broth jelly, and once he had it imprisoned in his tubes he studied all the habits of this vicious little vegetable, how it perished quickly when he dried it the least bit, how it could sneak into a healthy man by way of the soiled linen of patients that had died. He dredged this comma microbe up out of the stinking water of the tanks around which clustered the miserable Hindu’s huts--sad hovels from which drifted the moans of helpless ones that were dying of cholera. At last Koch sailed back to Germany, and here he was received like some returning victorious general. “Cholera never rises spontaneously,” he told his audience of learned doctors; “no healthy man can ever be attacked by cholera unless he swallows the comma microbe, and this germ can only develop from its like--it cannot be produced from any other thing, or out of nothing. And it is only in the intestine of man, or in highly polluted water like that of India that it can grow.” It is thanks to these bold searchings of Robert Koch that Europe and America no longer dread the devastating raids of these puny but terrible little murderers from the Orient--and their complete extermination from the world waits only upon the civilization and sanitation of India.... VIII From the German Emperor’s own hand Koch now received the Order of the Crown, with Star, but in spite of that his countrified hat continued to fit his stubbly head, and when admirers adored him he only said to them: “I have worked as hard as I could ... if my success has been greater than that of most ... the reason is that I came in my wanderings through the medical field upon regions where the gold was still lying by the wayside ... and that is no great merit.” The hunters who believed that microbes were the chief foes of man, these men were brave, but there was careless heroism too among some of the ancient doctors and old-fogey sanitarians who thought that all this new stuff about microbes was claptrap and nonsense. Old Professor Pettenkofer of Munich was the leader of the skeptics who were not convinced by Koch’s clear experiments, and when Koch came back from India with those comma bacilli that he was sure were the authors of cholera Pettenkofer wrote him something like this: “Send me some of your so-called cholera germs, and I’ll show you how harmless they are!”