In the summer of 1900 Battista Grassi went to the plain of Capaccio. The hot days were just beginning, the anopheles were on the march. In the windows and on the doors of ten little houses of station-masters and employees of the railroad Grassi put up wire screens, so fine-meshed and so perfect that the slickest and the slightest of the zanzarone could not slip through them. Then Grassi, armed with authority from the officials of the railroad, supplied with money by the Queen of Italy, became a task-master, a Pharaoh with lashes. One hundred and twelve souls--railroad men and their families--became the experimental animals of Battista Grassi and had to be careful to do as he told them. They had to stay indoors in the beautiful but dangerous twilight. Careless of death--especially unseen death--as all healthy human beings are careless, these one hundred and twelve Italians had to take precautions, to avoid the stabs of mosquitoes. Grassi had the devil of a time with them. Grassi scolded them. Grassi kept them inside those screens by giving them prizes of money. Grassi set them an indignant example by coming down to Albanella, most deadly place of all, and sleeping two nights a week behind those screens. All around those screen-protected station houses the zanzarone swarmed in humming thousands--it was a frightful year for mosquitoes. Into the _un-screened_ neighboring station houses (there were four hundred and fifteen wretches living in those houses), the zanzarone swooped and sought their prey. Almost to a man, woman, and child, those four hundred and fifteen men, women and children fell sick with the malaria. And of those one hundred and twelve prisoners behind the screens at night? They were rained on during the day, they breathed that air that for a thousand years the wisest men were sure was the cause of malaria, they fell asleep at twilight, they did all of the things the most eminent physicians had always said it was dangerous to do, but in the dangerous evenings they stayed behind screens--and only five of them got the malaria during all that summer. Mild cases these were, too, maybe only relapses from the year before, said Grassi. “In the so-much-feared station of Albanella, from which for years so many coffins had been carried, one could live as healthily as in the healthiest spot in Italy!” cried Grassi. VIII Such was the fight of Ronald Ross and Battista Grassi against the assassins of the red blood corpuscles, the sappers of vigorous life, the destroyer of men, the chief scourge of the lands of the South--the microbe of malaria. There were aftermaths of this fight, some of them too long to tell, and some too painful. There were good aftermaths and bad ones. There are fertile fields now, and healthy babies, in Italy and Africa and India and America, where once the hum of the anopheles brought thin blood and chattering teeth, brought desolate land and death. There is the Panama Canal....