But when he came to the medical school at Albany, he found no excitement about possibly dastardly bacilli among the doctors of the faculty; germs had not yet been set up as targets for the healing shots of the medical profession; there was no course in bacteriology there--nor, for that matter, in any medical school in America. But he wanted to do science! And, caring nothing for the healthy drunkennesses and scientific obscenities of the ordinary medical student, Theobald Smith soothed himself with the microscopic study of the interiors of cats. In his first published paper he made certain shrewd observations on peculiar twists of anatomy in the depths of the bellies of cats--that was his bow as a searcher. He graduated and wanted above everything to be an experimenter, but he had, before anything, to make a living. Just then young American doctors were hurrying to Europe, eager to look over Koch’s shoulder to learn ways to paint bacilli, to breed them true, to shoot them under the skins of animals, and to talk like real experts about them. Theobald Smith would have liked to go but he had to find a job. And presently, while those other well-off young Americans were getting in on the ground floor of the new exciting science (afterward they told how they had actually worked in the same room with those great Germans!) and when they were getting ready to land important professorships, Theobald Smith got his job. A humble and surely not academically respectable job it was too! For he was appointed one of the staff of the then feeble, struggling, insignificant, financially rather ill-nourished, and in general almost negligible Bureau of Animal Industry at Washington. Counting Smith, there were four members of the staff of this Bureau. The Chief was a good man named Salmon. He was enthusiastically interested in what germs might do to cows and sincerely passionate about the importance of bacilli to pigs--but he knew nothing of how to find the microbes harassing these valuable creatures. Then there was Mr. Kilborne who rejoiced in the degree of Bachelor of Agriculture and was something of a horse doctor (he now runs a hardware store in New York, up-state). And finally, this staff to which Smith came, was glorified by the ancient and redoubtable Alexander, a darky ex-slave who sat about solemnly, and when urged, got up to wash the dirty bottles or chaperon the guinea-pigs.