Then there is Sir Ronald Ross, who was--as once he hoped and dreamed--given enthusiastic banquets. There is Ronald Ross who got the Nobel Prize of seven thousand eight hundred and eighty pounds sterling for his discovery of how the gray mosquito carries malaria to birds.... There is Battista Grassi who didn’t get the Nobel Prize, and is now unknown, except in Italy, where they huzzahed for him and made him a Senator (he never missed a meeting of that Senate to within a year of his death). All these are, for the most part, good, even if some of them are slightly ironical aftermaths. Then there is Ronald Ross, who had learned the hard game of searching while he made his discovery about the gray mosquito--you would say his best years of work were just beginning--there is Ronald Ross, insinuating Grassi was a thief, hinting that Grassi was a charlatan, saying Grassi had added almost nothing to the proof that mosquitoes carry malaria to men! There was Grassi--justifiably purple with indignation, writing violent papers in reply.... You cannot blame him! But why will such searchers scuffle, when there are so many things left to find? You would think--of course it would be so in a novel--that they could have ignored each other, or could have said: “The facts of science are greater than the little men who find those facts!”--and then have gone on searching, and saving. For the fight has only just begun. The day I finish this tale, it is twenty-five years after the perfect experiment of Grassi, comes this news item from Tokio--it is stuck away down in a corner of an inside page of a newspaper: “The population of the Ryukyu Islands, which lie between Japan and Formosa, is rapidly dying off.... Malaria is blamed principally. In eight villages of the Yaeyama group ... not a single baby has been born for the last thirty years. In Nozoko village ... one sick old woman was the only inhabitant....” CHAPTER XI WALTER REED IN THE INTEREST OF SCIENCE--AND FOR HUMANITY! I With yellow fever it was different--there were no brawls about it. Everybody is agreed that Walter Reed--head of the Yellow Fever Commission--was a courteous man and a blameless one, that he was a mild man and a logical: there is not one particle of doubt he had to risk human lives; animals simply will not catch yellow fever! Then it is certain that the ex-lumberjack, James Carroll, was perfectly ready to let go his own life to prove Reed’s point, and he was not too sentimental about the lives of others when _he_ needed to prove a point--which might and might not be what you would call a major point.