He went back to England on his first furlough in 1888, and there something happened to him, an event that is often an antidote to cynicism and a regulator of confused multitudinous ambitions. He met, he was smitten with, and presently he married Miss Rosa Bloxam. Back in India--though he wrote another novel called “Child of Ocean” and invented systems of shorthand and devised phonetic spellings for the writing of verse and was elected secretary of the Golf Club--he began to fumble at his proper work. In short he began to turn a microscope, with which he was no expert, on to the blood of malarious Hindus. The bizarre, many-formed malaria microbe had been discovered long ago in 1880 by a French army surgeon, Laveran, and Ronald Ross, who was as original as he was energetic and never did anything the way anybody else did it, tried to find this malaria germ by methods of his own. Of course, he failed again. He bribed, begged, and wheedled drops of blood out of the fingers of hundreds of aguey East Indians. He peered. He found nothing. “Laveran is certainly wrong! There is no germ of malaria!” said Ronald Ross, and he wrote four papers trying to prove that malaria was due to intestinal disturbances. That was his start in microbe hunting! III He went back to London in 1894, plotting to throw up medicine and science. He was thirty-six. “Everything I had tried had failed,” he wrote, but he consoled himself by imagining himself a sad defiant lone wolf: “But my failure did not depress me ... it drove me aloft to peaks of solitude.... Such a spirit was a selfish spirit but nevertheless a high one. It desired nothing, it sought no praise ... it had no friends, no fears, no loves, no hates.” But as you will see, Ronald Ross knew nothing of himself, for when he got going at his proper work, there was never a less calm and more desirous spirit than his. Nor a more enthusiastic one. And how he could hate! When Ross returned to London he met Patrick Manson, an eminent and mildly famous English doctor. Manson had got himself medically notorious by discovering that mosquitoes can suck worms out of the blood of Chinamen (he had practiced in Shanghai); Manson had proved--this is remarkable!--that these worms can even develop in the stomachs of mosquitoes. Manson was obsessed by mosquitoes, he believed they were among the peculiar creatures of God, he was convinced they were important to the destinies of man, he was laughed at, and the medical wiseacres of Harley Street called him a “pathological Jules Verne.” He was sneered at. And then he met Ronald Ross--whom the world had sneered at. What a pair of men these two were! Manson knew so little about mosquitoes that he believed they could only suck blood once in their lives, and Ross talked vaguely about mosquitoes and gnats not knowing that mosquitoes _were_ gnats. And yet----