Manson took Ross to his office, and there he set Ross right about the malaria microbe of Laveran that Ross did not believe in. He showed Ronald Ross the pale malaria parasites, peppered with a blackish pigment. Together they watched these germs, fished out of the blood of sailors just back from the equator, turn into little squads of spheres inside the red blood cells, then burst out the blood cells. “That happens just when the man has his chill,” explained Manson. Ross was amazed at the mysterious transformations and cavortings of the malaria germs in the blood. After those spheres had galloped out of the corpuscles, they turned suddenly into crescent shapes, then those crescents would shoot out two, three, four, sometimes six long whips, which lashed and curled about and made the beast look like a microscopic octopus. “That, Ross, is the parasite of malaria--you never find it in people without malaria--but the thing that bothers me is: How does it get from one man to another?” Of course that didn’t really bother Patrick Manson at all. Every cell in that man’s brain had in it a picture of a mosquito or the memory of a mosquito or a speculation about a mosquito. He was a mild man, not a terrific worker himself, but intensely prejudiced on this subject of mosquitoes. And he appreciated Ronald Ross’s energy of a dynamo, he knew Ronald Ross adored him, and he remembered Ross was presently returning to India. So one day, as they walked along Oxford Street, Patrick Manson took his jump: “Do you know, Ross,” he said, “I have formed the theory that mosquitoes carry malaria...?” Ronald Ross did not sneer or laugh. Then the old doctor from Shanghai poured his fantastic theory over this young man whom he wanted to make his hands: “The mosquitoes suck the blood of people sick with malaria ... the blood has those crescents in it ... they get into the mosquito’s stomach and shoot out those whips ... the whips shake themselves free and get into the mosquito’s carcass.... The whips turn into some tough form like the spore of an anthrax bacillus.... The mosquitoes die ... they fall into water ... people drink a soup of dead mosquitoes....”