Left alone, or snubbed at Breslau, he might easily have gone back to Wollstein to his business of telling people to stick out their tongues. In short, men of science have either to be showmen--as were the magnificent Spallanzani and the passionate Pasteur--or they have to have impresarios. Koch packed up Emmy and his household goods and moved to Breslau and was given a job as city physician at four hundred and fifty dollars a year, and was supposed to eke out his living with the private patients that would undoubtedly flock to be treated by such a brilliant man. So thought Cohn and Cohnheim. But the doorbell of Koch’s little office didn’t ring, hardly any one came to ring it, and so Koch learned that it is a great disadvantage for a doctor to be brainy and inquire into the final causes of things. He went back to Wollstein, beaten, and here from 1878 to 1880 he made long jumps ahead in microbe hunting once more--spying on and tracking down the strange sub-visible beings that cause the deadly infections of wounds in animals and in human beings. He learned to stain all kinds of bacilli with different colored dyes, so that the very tiniest microbe would stand out clearly. In some unknown way he saved money enough to buy a camera and stuck its lens against his microscope and learned--no one helping him--how to take pictures of these little creatures. “You’ll never convince the world about these murderous bugs until you can show them photographs,” Koch said. “Two men can’t look through one microscope at the same time, no two men will ever draw the same picture of a germ--so there’ll always be wrangling and confusion.... But these photographs can’t lie--and ten men can study them, and come to an agreement on them....” So it was that Koch began to try to introduce rime and reason into the baby science of microbe hunting which up till now had been as much a wordy brawl as a quest for knowledge. Meanwhile his friends at Breslau had not forgotten him and in 1880--it was like some bush-leaguer breaking into the big team--he was told by the government to come to Berlin and be Extraordinary Associate of the Imperial Health Office. Here he was given a fine laboratory and a sudden undreamed-of wealth of apparatus and two assistants and enough money so that he could spend sixteen or eighteen hours of his working day among his stains and tubes and chittering guinea-pigs.