So it was--it is most fantastical--that Battista Grassi went more than two-thirds of the way to solving this puzzle of how malaria gets from sick men to healthy ones before he had ever made a single experiment in his laboratory! For, everywhere where there was malaria, there _were_ mosquitoes. And _such_ mosquitoes! They were certainly a very special definite sort of blood-sucking mosquito Grassi found. “Zan-za-ro-ne, we call that kind of mosquito,” the householders told him. Always, where the “zan-za-ro-ne” buzzed, there Grassi found deep flushed faces on rumpled beds, or faces with chattering teeth going towards those beds. Always where that special and definite mosquito sang at twilight, Grassi found fields waiting for some one to till them, and from the houses of the little villages that sat in these fields, he saw processions emerging, and long black boxes.... There was no mistaking this mosquito, zanzarone, once you had spotted her; she was a frivolous gnat that flew up from the marshes towards the lights of the towns; she was an elegant mosquito proud of four dark spots on her light brown wings; she was not a too dignified insect who sat in an odd way with the tail-end of her body sticking up in the air [that was one way he could spot her, for the Culex mosquitoes drooped their tails]; she was a brave blood-sucker who thought: “The bigger they are the more blood I get out of them!” So zanzarone preferred horses to men and men to rabbits. That was zanzarone, and the naturalists had given her the name _Anopheles claviger_ many years before. _Anopheles claviger!_ This became the slogan of Battista Grassi. You can see him, shuffling along behind lovers in the dusk, making fists of his fingers to keep himself from pouncing on the zanzarone who made meals off their regardless necks.... You can see this Grassi, sitting in a stagecoach with no springs, oblivious to bumps, deaf to the chatter of his fellow-passengers, with absent eyes counting the _Anopheles claviger_ he had discovered--with delight--riding on the ceiling of the wagon in which he journeyed from one utterly terrible little malarious village to another still more cursed. [Illustration: (line drawing of zanzarone and Culex mosquitoes)] “I’ll try them on myself!” Grassi cried. He went up north to his home in Rovellasca. He taught boys how to spot the anopheles mosquito. The boys brought boxes full of these she-zanzarone from towns where malaria rages. Grassi took these boxes to his bedroom, put on his night shirt, opened the boxes, crawled into bed--but curse it! not one of the zanzarone bit him. Instead they flew out of his room and bit Grassi’s mother, “fortunately without ill effect!”