“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. CHAPTER II SPALLANZANI MICROBES MUST HAVE PARENTS! I “Leeuwenhoek is dead, it is too bad, it is a loss that cannot be made good. Who now will carry on the study of the little animals?” asked the learned men of the Royal Society in England, asked Réaumur and the brilliant Academy in Paris. Their question did not wait long for an answer, for the janitor of Delft had hardly closed his eyes in 1723 for the long sleep that he had earned so well, when another microbe hunter was born, in 1729 a thousand miles away in Scandiano in northern Italy. This follower of Leeuwenhoek was Lazzaro Spallanzani, a strange boy who lisped verses while he fashioned mudpies; who forgot mudpies to do fumbling childish and cruel experiments with beetles and bugs and flies and worms. Instead of pestering his parents with questions, he examined living things in nature, by pulling legs and wings off them, by trying to stick them back on again. He must find out how things worked; he didn’t care so very much what they looked like. Like Leeuwenhoek, the young Italian had to fight to become a microbe hunter against the wishes of his family. His father was a lawyer and did his best to get Lazzaro interested in long sheets of legal foolscap--but the youngster sneaked away and skipped flat stones over the surface of the water, and wondered why the stones skipped and didn’t sink. In the evenings he was made to sit down before dull lessons, but when his father’s back was turned he looked out of the window at the stars that gleamed in the velvet black Italian sky, and next morning lectured about them to his playmates until they called him “The Astrologer.”