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We may well wonder: Why did not Laveran simply recognize those sexual forms, and why did he not seek for the period of conjugation in the plasmodia, which were animal micro-organisms? If he had borne in mind the complete cycle of the protozoa, he would have recognized them.
He took these to be transformations of the plasmodia, "modified in form" and "incapable of producing disease," and pronounced them to be "degenerate" organisms, almost as if they had been deformed and exhausted by the "excess of work" they had previously performed. These organisms were described as "Laveran's degenerative forms."
How was it that no one asked himself how it was possible that the plasmodia could enter the current of the blood from the air? What was the species of torpor which took possession of the intelligence of persons who had specialized in intellectual work? Here was a colossal sum of intelligence, without any individuality.
But evidently Morel's theories of the degeneration of man had made a much livelier impression on his imagination; and his leap from these remote theories to his interpretation of the plasmodia seemed an achievement of "genius." It may be said that this "feat of genius," this visionary generalization, prevented Laveran from seeing the truth.
Laveran had found that in the blood of sufferers who recover spontaneously from malarial fever there are a great number of corpuscles which have no longer the rounded forms of the plasmodia, but are crescent-shaped and rayed.
How long the infection may lurk in the body is uncertain; certainly for months, and possibly for years. Many cases are on record which had typical chills and fever, with abundance of plasmodia in the blood, years after leaving the tropics or other malarious districts; but there is often the possibility of a recent re-infection.
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