Sir Ronald Ross 219 



After many months the strain of the work in a torrid 

 climate began to tell upon Ross. He writes of this period 

 in his Memoirs (Murray, London, 1923) : 



At first I toiled comfortably, but as failure followed failure, 

 I became exasperated and worked until I could hardly see my 

 way home late in the afternoons. Well do I remember that 

 dark, hot little office in the hospital at Begumpett, with the 

 necessary gleam of light coming in from under the eaves of the 

 veranda. The screws of my microscope were rusted with sweat 

 from my forehead and hands, and its last remaining eye-piece 

 was cracked. 



By now he had begun to suspect that the mosquito he 

 sought was a type which eluded him. One morning a 

 'mosquito-man,' one of the three who collected the insects 

 for him, produced some larvae which hatched into brown 

 mosquitoes with three black bars on their wings. These 

 proved to be dapple-winged mosquitoes of a type which 

 Ross had not worked with before. 



They were allowed to bite a malarial patient in the 

 hospital, and later some were dissected. Again no germs 

 of malaria were found. That was on August 16th, 1897, 

 in Secunderabad. Ross secured more specimens of the 

 dappled-winged brown mosquito during the next few 

 days. 



Thus the story comes to August 20th, 1897, the anniver- 

 sary of which Sir Ronald Ross still calls Mosquito Day. 

 The first few mosquitoes placed under the microscope 

 revealed nothing. Then Ross came to one of the last of 

 the batch which had been allowed to feed upon the 

 malarial patient on the 16th. His eyes were already 

 feeling the strain, but carefully, methodically, he searched 

 through the tissues of that tiny winged creature. Again 

 nothing. At last only the stomach of the insect remained 

 to be examined. That meant half an hour's work, and 

 already he was tired out. Moreover, he had examined the 



