You might know Giovanni Battista Grassi would be the man to do what Ronald Ross had not quite succeeded in bringing off. He had been educated for a doctor, at Pavia where that glittering Spallanzani had held forth amid applause a hundred years before. Grassi had been educated for a doctor (Heaven knows why) because he had no sooner got his license than he set himself up in business as a searcher in zoölogy. With a certain amount of sniffishness he always insisted: “I am a zoologo--not a medico!” Deliberate as a glacier, precise as a ship’s chronometer, he started finding answers to the puzzles of nature. Correct answers! His works were pronounced classics right after he published them--but it was his habit not to publish them for years after he started to do them. He made known the secret comings and goings of the Society of the White Ants--not only this, but he discovered microbes that plagued and preyed upon these white ants. He knew more than any man in the world about eels--and you may believe it took a searcher with the insight of a Spallanzani to trace out the weird and romantic changes that eels undergo to fulfill their destiny as eels. Grassi was not strong. He had abominable eyesight. He was full of an argumentative petulance. He was a contradictory combination of a man too modest to want his picture in the papers but bawling at the same time for the last jot and tittle of credit for everything that he did. And he did everything. Already, when he was only twenty-nine, before Ross had dreamt of becoming a searcher, Battista Grassi was a professor, and had published his famous monograph upon the Chaetognatha (I do not know what they are!). Before Ronald Ross knew that anybody had ever thought of mosquitoes carrying malaria, Grassi had had the idea, had taken a whirl at experiments on it, but had used the wrong mosquito, and failed. But that failure started ideas stewing in his head while he worked at other things--and how he worked! Grassi detested people who didn’t work. “Mankind,” he said, “is composed of those who work, those who pretend to work, and those who do neither.” He was ready to admit that he belonged in the first class, and it is entirely certain that he did belong there.