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St. Petersburg 1911. "How can you keep your faith in humanity? I think it is all so weak and not beautiful, and life as it goes somehow such an outrageous fizzle. Why are there such beautiful things, conceptions, possibilities only to be ruined by fatal microbes this human nature puts into it? Life only in yearning; Death to crown realization; peace only in oblivion. What for?
The microbes that fix the nitrogen of the air and those which convert the ammoniacal compounds into nitrous ones, and these again into nitrates, have, by the same splitting up of a tendency primitively one, rendered to the whole vegetable world the same kind of service as the vegetables in general have rendered to animals.
The mother thinks constantly of her child, the savant of his science, the artist of his art, the inventor of his inventions, the philanthropist of his endowments, Faraday of electricity, Stephenson of his locomotive, Pasteur of his microbes, De Lesseps of his isthmus, sisters of charity of their poor.
Our properties and appetites are but the sum of those of the protoplasmic organisms the cells of which we are built up. Our need for a relish with oysters is the same thing as the need of the phagocyte for a relish with its microbes, not something "poetically" compared to it. The story of "the oysters and the carpenter" might be replaced by that of "the microbes and the phagocyte."
But the horror they had of him who had so deceived them was but a little thing when compared with the hideous dread that the impostor inspired ere he had lain for a week in his grave in Berwick. Men who lived in those days had many an evil thing to dread, for wolves, ghouls, and vampires were as terribly real to them as in our day are the microbes of cancer, of fever, or of tuberculosis.
" Plague bacilli may be found in fleas from four to six days after they have sucked the blood of an animal dying with plague. " The numbers of plague microbes in the infected fleas and bugs increase during the first few days. " The fæces of infected fleas and bugs contain virulent plague microbes as long as they persist in the alimentary canal of these insects.
Dell ain't used to roughing it; she's just out of a medical school got her diploma, she was telling me in the last letter before this. She'll be finding microbes by the million in this old shack. You tell Patsy I'll be late to supper and tell him to brace up and cook something ladies like cake and stuff. Patsy'll know. I'd give a dollar to get that little runt in the office "
The skillful surgeon bids defiance to the microbes that hover in swarming millions ravenous for admission to every hurt done to the human body. To them a wound is a festival. To them a sore is a royal banquet to which through the invisible realm a proclamation goes forth, "Come ye! Come to the banquet which death is preparing out of life!"
Even he, the prose artist of fiction, which after all is but truth often dragged out of a well and clothed in the painted robe of imagined phrases even he has his place among kings, demagogues, priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes, cabinet ministers, Fabians, bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists, Kafirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes, and constellations of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in itself.
This is of course a most fortunate thing for us, for the parasitic germs are everywhere. There is perhaps "more truth than poetry" in the following newspaper jingle: "Sing a song of microbes, Dainty little things, Eyes and ears and horns and tails, Claws and fangs and stings. Microbes in the carpet, Microbes in the wall, Microbes in the vestibule, Microbes in the hall.
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