“I’ll try them on myself!” Grassi cried. He went up north to his home in Rovellasca. He taught boys how to spot the anopheles mosquito. The boys brought boxes full of these she-zanzarone from towns where malaria rages. Grassi took these boxes to his bedroom, put on his night shirt, opened the boxes, crawled into bed—but curse it! not one of the zanzarone bit him. Instead they flew out of his room and bit Grassi’s mother, “fortunately without ill effect!”

Then Grassi went back to Rome to his lectures, and on September 28th of 1898, before ever he had done a single serious experiment, he read his paper before the famous and ancient Academy of the Lincei: “It is the anopheles mosquito that carries malaria if any mosquito carries malaria....” And he told them he was suspicious of two other brands of mosquitoes—but that was absolutely all, out of the thirty or forty different tribes that infected the low places of Italy.

Then came an exciting autumn for Battista Grassi and an entertaining autumn for the wits of Rome, and a most important autumn for mankind. Besides all that it was a most itchy autumn for Mr. Sola, who for six years had been a patient of Dr. Bastianelli in the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, high up on the top floor of this hospital that sat on a high hill of Rome. Here zanzarone never came. Here nobody ever got malaria. Here was the place for experiments. And here was Mr. Sola, who had never had malaria, every twist and turn of whose health Dr. Bastianelli knew, who told Battista Grassi that he would not mind being shut up with three different brands of hungry she-mosquitoes every night for a month.

Grassi and Bignami and Bastianelli started off, strangely enough, with those two minor mosquito suspects—those two culexes that Grassi had discovered always hanging around malarious places along with the zanzarone.... They tortured Mr. Sola each night with hundreds of these mosquitoes. They shut poor Mr. Sola up in that room with those devils and turned off the light....

Nothing happened. Sola was a tough man. Sola showed not a sign of malaria.

(It is not clear why Grassi did not start off by loosing his zanzarone at this Mr. Sola.)

Maybe it was because Robert Koch had laughed publicly at this idea of the zanzarone—Grassi does admit that discouraged him.

But, one fine morning, Grassi hurried out of Rome to Moletta and came back with a couple of little bottles in which buzzed ten fine female anopheles mosquitoes. That night Mr. Sola had a particularly itchy time of it. Ten days later this stoical old gentleman shook horribly with a chill, his body temperature shot up into a high fever—and his blood swarmed with the microbes of malaria.

“The rest of the history of Sola’s case has no interest for us,” wrote Grassi, “but it is now certain that mosquitoes can carry malaria, to a place where there are no mosquitoes in nature, to a place where no case of malaria has ever occurred, to a man who has never had malaria—Mr. Sola!”

Over the country went Grassi once more, chasing zanzarone, hoarding zanzarone: in his laboratory he tenderly raised zanzarone on winter-melons and sugar-water; and in the top of the hospital of the Holy Spirit, in those high mosquito-proof rooms, Grassi and Bastianelli (to say nothing of another assistant, Bignami) loosed zanzarone into the bedrooms of people who had never had malaria—and so gave them malaria.

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.

Grassi was as persistent as Ronald Ross had been erratic. He plugged up every little hole in his theory that anopheles is the one special and particular mosquito to bring malaria to men. By a hundred air-tight experiments he proved the malaria of birds could not be carried by the mosquitoes who brought it to men and that the malaria of men could never be strewn abroad by the mosquitoes who brought it to birds. Nothing was too much trouble for this Battista Grassi! He knew as much about the habits and customs and traditions of those zanzarone as if he himself were a mosquito and the king and ruler of mosquitoes....

VII

What is more, Battista Grassi was a practical man, and as I have said, an excessively patriotic man. He wanted to see his discovery do well by Italy, for he loved his Italy faithfully and violently. His experiments were no sooner finished, the last good strong nail was no sooner driven into the house of his case against the anopheles, than he began telling people, and writing in newspapers, and preaching—you might almost say he went about, bellowing till he bored everybody:

“Keep away the zanzarone and in a few years Italy will be free from malaria!”

He became a fanatic on the best ways to kill anopheles: he was indignant (that man had no sense of humor!) because townspeople insisted on strolling through their streets in the dusk. “How can you be so foolish as to walk in the twilight?” Grassi asked them. “That is the very time when the malaria mosquito is waiting for you.”

He was the very type of the silly sanitarian. “Don’t go out in the warm evenings,” he told every one, “unless you wear heavy cotton gloves and veils!” (Imagine young Italians making love in heavy cotton gloves and veils.) So there was a good deal of sniggering at this professor who had become a violent missionary against the zanzarone.

But Battista Grassi was a practical man! “One family, staying free from the tortures of malaria—that would be worth ten years of preaching—I’ll have to show them!” he muttered. So, in 1900, after his grinding experiments of 1898 and ’99, this tough man set out to “show them.” He went down into the worst malaria region of Italy, along the railroad line that ran through the plain of Capaccio. It was high summer. It was deadly summer there, and every summer the poor wretches of railroad workers, miserable farmers whose blood was gutted by the malaria poison, would leave that plain, at the cost of their jobs, at the cost of food, at the risk of starvation—to the hills to flee the malaria. And every summer from the swamps at twilight swarmed the malignant hosts of female zanzarone; at each hot dusk they made their meals and did their murders, and in the night, bellies full of blood, they sang back to their marshes, to marry and lay eggs and hatch out thousands more of their kind.

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....

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....”