wrote: "Your baby's grandfather, William Nast, was, in my 1^1 

 estimation, one of the greatest men of his age. . . . ;" and 

 expanding in opinion, added: "Children are the greatest of 

 God's gifts in this world aside from the gift of eternal life 

 through Christ, His Son." 



Ward, in his world search for parasites, had visited the 

 Wherrys. "How can I thank you both for your splendid treat- 

 ment of a wandering Swede," he wrote; and reporting out of 

 Seattle where he was, continued (July 16, 1908) : "Gave Dr 

 C W Chapin of the U S P H and M H laboratory here your 

 leprosy paper. He thinks he has seen the disease. . . . He does 

 only little work but that very carefully. Rats found dead of 

 plague here last week! They are doing almost nothing!!! 

 Some DR.S say they never had plague here! ! !" 



This month of July was a fateful one. Plague in Seattle was 

 to be taken, of course, as just another example of seaport 

 infestation; but what about those inland instances, widely 

 dispersed, in California? Down in the Livermore valley, 

 William Stewart Taylor (sixty) was rounding out a thirty- 

 year devotion to its medical interests. Three generations knew 

 his medicine chest and his surgery; but few men only, his 

 bacteriological laboratory and the depths of his thinking. 

 Pointing to the pitted hillsides as he drove to the sick, he said: 

 "The ground squirrels are dying again as they did three and 

 six years ago. An epidemic is raging among them." And asked 

 what kind, he answered: "It's bubonic plague, for I have rolled 

 over the dead with a stick and seen their buboes." 



With Wherry now active in Oakland, Taylor picked up a 

 fresh specimen before its hole on a July morning and, sealing 

 it in a can, dispatched it to him. It arrived of a late afternoon. 

 At six that night Wherry telephoned me that its tissues showed 

 the anatomic lesions of plague and that the smears from them 

 were filled with "enormous numbers of bipolar staining rods." 

 He had made inoculations into rats, various and sundry cul- 

 tures also, and would report shortly. Three days later came 

 this message: "The cultures show involutional forms and my 

 inoculated rats are sick." When he killed them, he saw again 

 the lesions of plague and recaptured his bacillus in pure 

 culture. 



