In a little room lighted by a dormer window under the roof in the attic of a government building, Smith set out to hunt microbes. It was his proper business! Naturally he went at it, as if he had been born with a syringe in his hand and a platinum wire in his mouth. Though a university graduate, he read German well, and of nights, with gulps, he gobbled up the brave doings of Robert Koch; like a young duck taking to the water he began to imitate Koch’s subtle ways of nursing and waylaying hideous bacilli and those strange spirilla who swim about like living corkscrews.... “I owe everything to Robert Koch!” he said, and thought of that far-off genius as some country baseball slugger might think of Babe Ruth. In his dingy attic he was tireless. It made no difference that he was not strong--all day and part of the night he hunted microbes. And he had musician’s fingers that helped him to brew microbe soups with very few spillings. In off moments he would swat the regiments of cockroaches who marched without stopping into his attic from the lumber room close by. In a remarkably short time he had taught himself everything needful and began to make cautious discoveries--he invented a queer new safe kind of vaccine, which contained no bacilli but only their filtered formless protein stuff. The heat of his attic was an intensification of the shimmering hell Washington knows how to be, but he wiped the sweat from the end of his nose and set to work in the right, classic way of Koch--with an astounding instinct he avoided the cruder methods of Pasteur. III You talk about freedom of science! You think a free choice to dig in any part of the Unknown is needed by searchers? I used to think so, and I have got into trouble with eminent authorities for saying so--too loudly. Wrong! For Theobald Smith, with little more freedom to start with than some low government clerk--had to research into things Dr. Salmon told him to research at, and Dr. Salmon was paid to direct Smith to solve puzzles which were bothering the farmers and stock-raisers. Such was science in the Bureau of Animal Industry. Dr. Salmon and Bachelor Kilborne and Theobald Smith--to say nothing of the indispensable Alexander--were expected to rush out like firemen and squirt science on the flaming epidemics threatening the pigs and heifers and bulls and rams of the farmers of the land. Just then the stock-raisers were seriously upset by a very weird disease, the Texas fever.