It was an itchy autumn and an exciting one. The newspapers became sarcastic and hinted that the blood of these poor human experimental animals would be on the heads of these three conspirators. But Grassi said: to the devil with the newspapers, he cheered when his human animals got sick, he gave them doses of quinine as soon as he was sure his zanzarone had given them malaria, and then “their histories had no further interest for him.” By now Grassi had read of those experiments of Ronald Ross with birds. “Pretty crude stuff!” thought this expert Grassi, but when he came to look for those strange doings of the circles and warts and spindle-shaped threads in the stomachs and saliva-glands of his she-anopheles, he found that Ronald Ross was exactly right! The microbe of human malaria in the body of his zanzarone did exactly the same things the microbe of bird malaria had done in the bodies of those mosquitoes Ronald Ross hadn’t known the names of. Grassi didn’t waste too much time praising Ronald Ross, who, Heaven knows, deserved praise, needed praise, and above all _wanted_ praise. Not Grassi! “By following my own way I have discovered that a special mosquito carried human malaria!” he cried, and then he set out--“It is with great regret I do this,” he explained--to demolish Robert Koch. Koch had been fumbling and muddling. Koch thought malaria went from man to man just as Texas fever traveled from cow to cow. Koch believed baby mosquitoes inherited malaria from their mothers, bit people, and so infected them. And Koch had sniffed at the zanzarone. So Grassi raised baby zanzarone. He let them hatch out in a room, and every evening in this room, for four months, sat this Battista Grassi with six or seven of his friends. What friends he must have had! For every evening they sat there in the dusk, barelegged with their trousers rolled up to their knees, bare-armed with their shirt sleeves rolled up to their elbows. Some of these friends, whom the anopheles relished particularly, were stabbed every night fifty or sixty times! So Grassi demolished Robert Koch, and so he proved his point, because, though the baby anopheles were children of mother mosquitoes who came from the most pestiferous malaria holes in Italy, not one of Grassi’s friends had a sign of malaria! “It is not the mosquito’s children, but only the mosquito who herself bites a malaria sufferer--it is only that mosquito who can give malaria to healthy people!” cried Grassi.