And so, with this report, Theobald Smith made mankind turn a corner, showed men an entirely new and fantastic way a disease may be carried--by an insect. And only by that insect. Wipe out that insect, dip all of your cattle to kill all their ticks, keep your northern cattle in fields where there are no ticks, and Texas fever will disappear from the earth. To-day whole states are dipping their cattle and to-day Texas fever which once threatened the great myriads of American cattle is no longer a matter for concern. But that is only the beginning of the beneficent deeds of this plain report, this classic unappreciated and completely out of print. For presently, on the veldt and in the dangerous bush of southern Africa, a burly Scotch surgeon-major swore at the bite of a tsetse fly--and wondered what else besides merely annoying one, these tsetse flies might do. And a little later in India, and at the same time in Italy, an Englishman and an Italian listened to the whining song of swarms of mosquitoes, and dreamed and wondered and planned strange experiments---- But those are the stories the next chapters will celebrate. They tell of ancient plagues now in reach of mankind’s complete control--they tell of a deadly yellow disease now almost entirely abolished. They tell of men projecting pictures of swarming human life and turreted cities of the future reaching up and up, built on jungles now fit only for man-killing wild beasts and lizards. It was this now nearly forgotten microbe hunting of Theobald Smith that first gave men the right to have visions of a world transformed. CHAPTER IX BRUCE TRAIL OF THE TSETSE I “Young man!”--the face of the Director-General of the British Army Medical Service changed from an irritated red to an indignant mauve-color--“young man, I will send you to India, I will send you to Zanzibar, I will send you to Timbuctoo--I will send you anywhere I please”--(the majestic old gentleman was shouting now, and his face was a positively furious purple) “but you may be damned sure I shall not send you to Natal!...” Reverberations....