rly defined, and stripped
of superfluous complications. Simplicity is the guide to discovery;
simplicity which, like truth, should be naked. Very little is
necessary; but this little must constitute a powerful unity; the rest
is vanity.

And the greater this vanity, that is to say, the futile encumbrance of
the mind, the more will the light of the spirit be darkened and its
forces dissipated, making it difficult or impossible not only to
reason and act, but even to perceive reality, to see.

* * * * *

It would be interesting to make a rapid survey of those collective
individual errors by which the progress of a new discovery of a simple
kind, offering relief to suffering humanity, has been impeded; errors
which have even caused persistent denial of the existence of obvious
facts, merely because these were not generally known.

Let us consider for a moment the discovery of the cause of malaria.
This discovery, due to the Englishman, Ross, in connection with birds,
and to the Italian, Grassi, in connection with man, consists in having
found out that the plasmodium of malaria, which produces the malady,
is inoculated in man and in the various animals subject to it, by a
special kind of mosquito. Let us inquire what was the state of science
prior to this discovery. In 1880 Laveran had described an animal
micro-organism, which preyed upon the red corpuscles of the blood,
producing an attack of fever with the cycle of its existence.
Subsequent studies confirmed and elucidated this fact, and the
_plasmodium malariae_ became a matter of common knowledge. It was
known that animal micro-organisms, unlike vegetable micro-organisms,
after a cycle of life in which reproduction takes place by
scission--that is, by subdivision of a single body into several other
bodies equal to the first, give place to _sexual forms_, masculine and
feminine, which are separate, and incapable of scission, but are
designed for _fusion into one another_, after which the organism
recommences its cycle of scissions until it again reaches the sexual
forms.

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. He took these to be transformations
of the plasmodia, "modified in form" and "incapable of producing
disease," and pronounced them to be "degenerate" organis