dow of cholera has quailed and gone back! Humanity
might well break out in rhapsody and jubilee over this great victory.

Among the personal agencies by which cholera has been excluded from
Europe and America, first and greatest is Dr. Robert Koch, of Berlin.
He, more than any other one man, has contributed to the glorious
exemption. Dr. Koch, now by the favor of his Emperor, Baron Koch, is
one of those heroic spirits who go before the human race exploring the
route, casting up a highway and gathering out the stones. Thus shall
the feet of the oncoming millions be not bruised and their shouts of
joy be not turned to lamentation.

Robert Koch was born at Klausthal, in the Hartz mountains, on the
eleventh of December, 1843. He is a German of the Germans. In his
youth he was a student of medicine at Goettingen, where at the age of
twenty-three he took his first degree. He was by nature and from his
boyhood a devotee of science. For about ten years he practiced his
profession, but continued his studies with indefatigable zeal. The
investigations of Pasteur had already filled Europe with applause when
Koch, following on the same lines of scientific exploration, began to
enlarge the borders of knowledge. He became a bacteriologist of the
first rank. He began to investigate the causes and nature of
contagion; but as late as 1876 his name was still unknown in the
cyclopaedias.

Koch was twenty-one years the junior of Pasteur; but his enthusiasm
and genius now bore him rapidly to a fame as great as that of his
predecessor. His first remarkable achievement was a demonstration of
the cause and cure of splenic fever in cattle. He showed, just as
Pasteur had done in similar cases, that the plague in question was due
to the specific poison of a bacterium, and that the disease might be
cured by inoculation against it. This he proceeded to do, and the
demonstration and good work brought him to the attention of the old
Emperor. Dr. Koch was made a member of the Imperial Board of Health in
Berlin.

A greater discovery was already at the door. Dr. Koch began a careful
investigation into the nature of consumption. His discovery of the
germ of splenic fever, and that of chicken cholera, as well as the
general results in this direction in other laboratories of Europe, led
him to the conjecture that consumption also is a zymotic or bacterial
disease. His inquiry into this subject began in 1879, and extended to
March of 1882. On that day,