Below in the dead house toiled Frederick Loeffler, boiling knives, heating platinum wires red hot and with them lifting grayish stuff from the still throats of those bodies the doctors had failed to keep alive; and this stuff he put into slim tubes capped with white fluffs of cotton, or he painted it with dyes, which showed him, through his microscope, that there were queer bacilli shaped like Indian clubs in those throats, microbes which the dye painted with pretty blue dots and stripes and bars. In nearly every throat he discovered these strange bacilli; he hurried to show them to his master, Koch. There is little doubt Koch led Loeffler by the hand in this discovery. “There is no use to jump at conclusions,” you can hear Koch telling him. “You must grow these microbes pure--then you must inject the cultivations into animals.... If those beasts come down with a disease exactly like human diphtheria, then....” How could Loeffler have gone wrong, with that terribly pedantic, but careful, truth-hunting little czar of microbe hunters squinting at him from behind those eternal spectacles? One dead child after another Loeffler examined; he poked into every part of each pitiful body; he stained a hundred different slices of every organ; he tried--and quickly succeeded--in growing those queer barred bacilli pure. But everywhere he searched, in every part of each body, he found no microbes--except in the membrane-cluttered throat. And always here, in every child but one or two, he came on those Indian club-shaped rods. “How can these few microbes, growing nowhere in the body but the throat--how can these few germs, staying in that one place, kill a child so quickly?” pondered Loeffler. “But I must follow Herr Koch’s directions!” and he proceeded to shoot the germs of his pure cultivations into the windpipes of rabbits and beneath the skins of guinea-pigs. Quickly these animals died--in two or three days, like a child, or even more quickly--but the microbes, which Loeffler had shot into them in millions, could only be found at the spot where he had injected them.... And sometimes there were none to be found even here, or at best a few feeble ones hardly strong enough, you would think, to hurt a flea.... “But how is it these few bacilli--sticking in one little corner of the body--how can they topple over a beast a million times larger than they are themselves?” asked Loeffler.