He left his wife and children in England, and on the twenty-eighth of March, 1895, he set sail for India, with Patrick Manson’s blessing, and full of his advice. Manson had outlined experiments--but how did one go about doing an experiment? But mosquitoes carry malaria! On with the mosquito hunt! On the ship Ross pestered the passengers, begging them to let him prick their fingers for a drop of blood.... He looked for mosquitoes, but they were not among the discomforts of the ship, so he dissected cockroaches--and he made an exciting discovery of a new kind of microbe in an unfortunate flying fish that had flopped on the deck. He was ordered to Secunderabad, a desolate military station that sat between hot little lakes in a huge plain dotted with horrid heaps of rocks, and here began to work with mosquitoes. He had to take care of patients too, he was only a doctor and the Indian Government--who can blame them?--would not for a moment recognize Ronald Ross as an official authentic microbe hunter or mosquito expert. He was alone. Everybody was against him from his colonel who thought him an insane upstart to the black-skinned boys who feared him for a dangerous nuisance (he was always wanting to prick their fingers!). The other doctors! They did not even believe in the malaria parasite. When they challenged him to show them the germs in the patient’s blood, Ross went to the fray full of confidence, dragging after him a miserable Hindu whose blood was rotten with malaria microbes, but when the fatal test was made--curse it!--that wretched Hindu suddenly felt fit as a fiddle. His microbes had departed from him. The doctors roared with laughter. But Ronald Ross kept at it. He started out to follow Manson’s orders. He captured mosquitoes, any kind of mosquito, he couldn’t for the life of him have told you what kind they were. He let the pests loose under nets over beds on which lay naked and foolishly superstitious dark-skinned people of a caste so low that they had no proper right to have emotions. The blood of these people was charmingly full of malaria microbes. The mosquitoes hummed under the nets--and wouldn’t bite. Curse it! They could not be made to bite! “They are stubborn as mules,” wrote Ross, in agony, to Patrick Manson. But he kept at it. He cajoled the mosquitoes. He pestered the patients. He put them in the hot sun “to bring their flavor out.” The mosquitoes kept on humming and remained sniffish. But, eureka! At last he hit on the idea of pouring water over the nets, soaking the nets--also the patients, but that was no matter--and finally the mosquitoes got to work and sucked their fill of Hindu blood. Ronald Ross caught them then, put them gingerly in bottles, then day after day killed them and peeped into their stomachs to see if those malaria microbes they had sucked in with the blood might be growing. They didn’t grow!