All Cubans (who were on the spot and ought to know) are agreed that those American soldiers who volunteered for the fate of guinea-pigs were brave beyond imagining. All Americans who were then in Cuba are sure that those Spanish immigrants who volunteered for the fate of guinea-pigs were not brave, but money-loving--for didn’t each one of them get two hundred dollars? Of course you might protest that fate hit Jesse Lazear a hard knock--but it was his own fault: why didn’t he brush that mosquito off the back of his hand instead of letting her drink her fill? Then, too, fate has been kind to his memory; the United States Government named a Battery in Baltimore Harbor in his honor! And that same government has been more than kind to his wife: the widow Lazear gets a pension of fifteen hundred dollars a year! You see, there are no arguments--and that makes it fun to tell this story of yellow fever. And aside from the pleasure, it has to be told: this history is absolutely necessary to the book of Microbe Hunters. It vindicates Pasteur! At last Pasteur, from his handsome tomb in that basement in Paris, can tell the world: “I told you so!” Because, in 1926, there is hardly enough of the poison of yellow fever left in the world to put on the points of six pins; in a few years there may not be a single speck of that virus left on earth--it will be as completely extinct as the dinosaurs--unless there is a catch in the fine gruesome experiments of Reed and his Spanish immigrants and American soldiers.... It was a grand coöperative fight, that scotching of the yellow jack. It was fought by a strange crew, and the fight was begun by a curious old man, with enviable mutton chop whiskers--his name was Doctor Carlos Finlay--who made an amazingly right guess, who was a terrible muddler at experiments, who was considered by all good Cubans and wise doctors to be a Theorizing Old Fool. What a crazy crank is Finlay, said everybody.