ose of a barracks. The
visitor felt chilled, disappointed, as if he had been met by the
insolent servant of an indifferent hostess. It seemed the home of the
mathematical, the mechanical, the material; but this was a mistake. It
was a house of dreams. The right knock at one of those ugly doors
would permit one to step into the presence of the most cheery, the
most learned, the most imaginative of individuals--the man of germs,
poet, dreamer, and experimentalist, absorbed in the pursuit of the
unattainable, concerned with the ultimate structure of organic life,
baffled, yet toiling on for love of his work, while the sick of the
world believe in him as an angel of altruism.

The far-away rivers of the world have all been traversed and mapped,
but the streams of blood in the arteries of man are filled with the
unknown. The habits of the Esquimaux, the customs of the dwarfs of
Central Africa, the ways of the baboons of Sumatra are minutely set to
book, but the wars of the phagocytes remain indeterminate,
unexplained. With microscope to his eye the bacteriologist is now
examining the constituent parts of the blood, isolating, breeding, and
minutely studying the germs of fevers, the growths of tumors, and
other elemental forms of human parasites, in order to discover their
antagonisms, their likings; for in these jungles of the flesh the war
of races proceeds quite as in the Amazonian forests--the white cells
against the red, devouring, destroying.

The men behind these bald, bleak doors are tireless workers as well as
seers and sages. They toil (at ridiculously low salaries) in the
avowed hope of eradicating diseases. They do not pause in dismay of
the insoluble. They--or such as they--discovered the cure for
small-pox, for hydrophobia, diphtheria, and for yellow-fever. They and
their like brought chloroform to the woman in travail, and ether to
the wounded soldier. They have enormously reduced the number of those
who die on the battle-field by their antiseptic dressings, and by one
discovery after another have made infantile diseases less destructive.
They already control yellow-fever and are about to eradicate
typhoid--yet they say "our work is but begun."

Here one comes upon their dreams. Calm and contained as their words
are, their hearts are aflame with passion for the undiscovered. They
are akin to those who seek the theoretic poles of the earth, undaunted
by endless defeats. With quickening breath they watch the e