His lectures for the year 1898 at the University of Rome over, he was a conscientious man who always gave more lectures than the law demanded, he needed a rest, and on the 15th of July he took it. Armed with sundry fat test-tubes and a notebook, he sallied out from Rome to those low hot places and marshy desolations where no man but an idiot would go for a vacation. Unlike Ross, this Grassi was a mosquito expert besides everything else that he was. His eyes--so red-rimmed and weak--were exceedingly sharp at spotting every difference between the thirty-odd different kinds of mosquitoes that he met. He went around with the fat test-tube in his hand, his ear cocked for buzzes. The buzz dies away as the mosquito lights. She has lit in an impossible place. Or she has lit in a disgusting place. No matter, Battista Grassi is up behind her, pounces on her, claps his fat test-tube over her, puts a grubby thumb over the mouth of the test-tube, paws over his prize and pulls her apart, scrawls little cramped pothooks in his notebook. That was Battista Grassi, up and down and around the nastiest places in Italy all that summer. So it was he cleared a dozen or twenty different mosquitoes of the suspicion of the crime of malaria--he was always finding these beasts in places where there was no malaria. He ruled out two dozen different kinds of gray mosquitoes and brindled mosquitoes, that he found anywhere--in saloons and bedrooms and the sacristies of cathedrals, biting babies and nuns and drunkards. “You are innocent!” shouted Battista Grassi at these mosquitoes. “For where you are none of these nuns or babies or drunkards suffers from malaria!” You will grant this was a most outlandish microbe hunting of Grassi’s. He went around making a nuisance of himself. He insinuated himself into the already sufficiently annoyed families of those hot malarious towns. He snooped annoyingly into the affairs of these annoyed families: “Is there malaria in your house?... Has there ever been malaria in your house?... How many have never had malaria in your house ... how many mosquito bites did your sick baby have last week?... What kind of mosquitoes bit him?” He was utterly without a sense of humor. And he was annoying. “No,” the indignant head of the house might tell him, “we suffer from malaria--but we are not bothered by mosquitoes!” Battista Grassi would never take his word for that. He snouted into pails and old crocks in the back yards. He peered beneath tables and behind sacred images and under beds. He even discovered mosquitoes hiding in shoes under those beds....