Now Ronald Ross did anything but live remotely on his mountain top. He wrote this to Manson, he wired it to Manson, he wrote it to Paris to old Alphonse Laveran, the discoverer of the malaria microbe; he sent papers to one scientific journal and two medical journals about it; he told everybody in Calcutta about it; he bragged about it--in short, this Ronald Ross was like a boy who had just made his first kite finding that the kite could really fly. He went wild--and then (it is too bad!) he collapsed. Patrick Manson went to Edinburgh and told the doctors of the great medical congress about the miracle of the sojourn and the growing and the meanderings of the malaria microbes in the bodies of gray she-mosquitoes: he described how his protégé, Ronald Ross, alone, obscure, laughed at, but tenacious, had tracked the germ of malaria from the blood of a bird through the belly and body of she-mosquitoes to their dangerous position in her stinger, ready to be shot into the next bird she bit. The learned doctors gaped. Then Patrick Manson read out a telegram from Ronald Ross. It was the final proof: the bite of a malarial mosquito had given a healthy bird malaria! The congress--this is the custom of congresses--permitted itself a dignified furore, and passed a resolution congratulating this unknown Major Ronald Ross on his “Great and Epoch-Making Discovery.” The congress--it is the habit of congresses--believed that what is true for birds goes for men too. The congress--men in the mass are ever uncritical--thought that this meant malaria would be wiped out from to-morrow on and forever--for what is simpler than to kill mosquitoes? So that congress permitted itself a furore. But Patrick Manson was not so sure: “One can object that the facts determined for birds do not hold, necessarily, for men.” He was right. There was the rub. This was what Ronald Ross seemed to forget: that nature is everlastingly full of surprises and annoying exceptions, and if there are laws and rules for the movements of the planets, there may be absolutely no apparent rime and less reason for the meanderings of the microbes of malaria.... Searchers, the best of them, still do no more than scratch the surface of the most amazing mysteries, all they can do (yet!) to find truth about microbes is to hunt, hunt endlessly.... There are no laws! So Patrick Manson was stern with Ronald Ross. This nervous man, feeling he could stand this cursed India not one moment longer, must stand it months longer, years longer! He had made a brilliant beginning, but only a beginning. He must keep on, if not for science, or for himself, then for England! For England! And in October Manson wrote him: “I hear Koch has failed with the mosquito in Italy, so you have time to grab the discovery for England.”