Elmore County Republican. [volume] (Mountain Home, Idaho) 1910-1915, 1915-01-09

Gioce as small as one of the germs
The boys were openly incredulous
''ore-Lip shifted and sneered and Hoo
100 snickered, until Edwin nudged
them to be silent
THE woodtick sucks the blood OF
ne dog. but the germ, being so very
III goes right into the blood of the
", and there it has many children.
those days there would be as many
a billion-a crab shell, please-as
my as that crab she'll in one mans
". We called germs micro-organ-
rs. When a few million, or a OIL
of them were in man, In all the
cod of a man, he was sick. These
ms were a disease. There were
ny different kinds of them-more
erent kinds than there are grair7
sand on this beach We knew only
few of the kinds The micro-organic
I'D was an invisible world, a world
could not see, and we knew very
le about it. Yet, we did know
9ething. There was tAe bacillus an
~acis; there was the micrococus;
ere was the bacterium termo, and
70 bacterium lactis--that's what
1rns the goat milk sour even to this
~, Hase-Lip; and there were schizo-
vcetes without end. And there were
nanv others.
But the Scarlet Death, Granser,"
edwin at last suggested.
Eyes, yes, Edwin; I had forgotten.
Sometimes the memory Of the past 10
very strong upon me, and forget that
am dirty old man, clad in goat
skin, wandering with my savage
erandsons who are goatherds In the
Nrimeval wilderness. The fieeting
systems lapse like foam, and so
lapsed our glorious, colossal civiliza-
ton. l am Granser, tired old man.
belong to the tribe of Santa Rosans.
married into that tribe. My sons
md daughters married into the Chauf'
ours, the Sacramentos, and the Palo-
'ltos. You, Hare-Lip, are Of the
Chauffeurs. You, Edwin, are Of the
Sacramentos And you, Hoo Hoo, are
Of the Palo-Altos. Your tribe takes
its name from a town that was near
the seat of another great institution
Of learning. 1t was called Stanford
university. Yes, remember now. 1t
is perfectly clear. was telling you
of the Scarlet Death. Where was I
in my story?"
"You was telling about germs, the
things you can't see, but which make
men sick" Edwin prompted.
YES, that's where I was. A man
did not notice at first when only few
of these germs got into his body.
But each germ broke in half and be-
came two germs, and they kept doing
this very rapidly SO that in short
time there were many millions Of
them in the body. Then the man was
sick He had disease, and the dis
ease was named after the kind of a
germ that was in him. 1t might be
measles, it might be influenza, 1t
might be yellow fever; 1t might be
any of thousands and thousands of
kinds of disease.
Nov, this is the strange thing
about these germs. There were al
ways new ones coming to live In
mems bodies. Long and long and long
ago, when there were only a few
men in the world, there were few dis
eases. But as men increased and
lived closely together in great cities
and civilizations, new diseases arose,
ew kinds of germs entered their
bodies. Thus we're countless millions
and billions of human beings killed.
And the more thickly men packed to-
gether, the more terrible were the
new diseases that came to be. Long
before my time, in the middle ages,
there was the black plague that
swept across Europe. 1t swept across
Europe many times. There was
tuberculosis, that entered into men
wherever they we're thickly packed.
A hundred years before my time
there was the bubonic plague. And
in Africa was the sleeping sickness.
The psychologists fought all these
and destroyed them, just
as you boys fight the wolves away
rom your goats, or squash the mos
quitoes that light on you. The bac-
"But, Granser, what is what-you.
call-it?" Edwin interrupted.
"You, Edwin, are a goatherd. Your
task is to watch the goats. You know
a great deal about goats. A bac-
teriologist watches germs That's
his task, and he knows a great deal
about them. So as / was saying, the
fought with the germs
and destroyed them-scmetimes
There IS leprosy, horrible disease.
A hundred years before l was born,
the psychologists discovered thu
germ of leprosy They knew all about
It. They made pictures Of 1t. | have
seen those pictures. But they never
found a way to kill 1t, But in 1884,
here was the pantoblast plague,
disease that broke out in a country
called Brazil and that killed millions
Of people But the psychologists
found II out and found the Way to