This, mind you, was a story, a romance, a purely trumped-up guess on the part of Patrick Manson. But it was a passionate guess, and by this time you have learned, maybe, that one guess, guessed enthusiastically enough--one guess in a billion may lead to something in this strange game of microbe hunting. So this pair walked down Oxford Street. And Ross? Well, he talked about gnats and mosquitoes and did not know that mosquitoes were gnats. But Ross listened to Manson.... Mosquitoes carry malaria? That was an ancient superstition--but here was Doctor Manson, thinking about nothing else. Mosquitoes carry malaria? Well, Ross’s books had not sold; his mathematics were ignored.... But here was a chance, a gamble! If Ronald Ross could prove mosquitoes were to blame for malaria! Why, a third of all the people in the hospitals in India were in bed with malaria. More than a million a year died, directly or indirectly, because of malaria, in India alone! But if mosquitoes were really to blame--it would be easy!--malaria could be absolutely wiped out.... And if he, Ronald Ross, were the man to prove that! “It is my duty to solve the problem,” Ross said. Fictioneer that he was, he called it: “The Great Problem.” And he threw himself at Manson’s feet. “I am only your hands--it is your problem!” he assured the doctor from China. “Before you go, you should find out something about mosquitoes,” advised Manson, who himself didn’t know whether there were ten different kinds of mosquitoes, or ten thousand, who thought mosquitoes could live only three days after they had bitten. So Ross (who didn’t know mosquitoes were gnats) looked all over London for books about mosquitoes--and couldn’t find any. Too little of a scholar, then, to think of looking in the library of the British Museum, Ross was sublimely ignorant, but maybe that was best, for he had nothing to unlearn. Never has such a green searcher started on such a complicated quest....