Page:Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, volume 1.djvu/145

Rh life-cycles and development of Plasmodium ziemanni and Haemo-proteus noctuoe, which are parasitic in the night-owl, and in which he followed the same organism through trypanosome and spirochaeta stages. I understand that some of the statements in this report, which is unusually intricate and complex even for Schaudinn, are still the subject of debate by protozoologists, but there is no diflerence of opinion on the phenomenal power of penetration, and the profound interpretative ability which were displayed by him in his observations and arguments.

In April, 1904, while at Rovigno, and when he was deep in this tropical work, which appealed to him more than anything he had yet undertaken, and where he had now attracted a large following of eager disciples, Schaudinn was suddenly recalled to Berlin, to undertake what the authorities considered more practical duties. But, in the pursuit of knowledge, nothing seemed to come amiss. During the course of an inquiry which he was called on to make as to an outbreak of miners' anaemia in Westphalia, he seized the opportunity to verify Looss's account of the route of transmission of anchylostomum larvae. Soon after this—in March, 1905—the medical world, which for a century had been searching the exudates and granulomata of syphilis for a microorganism, and which in despair had almost abandoned the quest, was electrified by Schaudinn's announcement of the constant presence of a spirochaete in the lesions of that disease. Of this, too, which in future years will rank as, perhaps, the greatest of all his discoveries, it must here suffice to say that Schaudinn, though he fully realised the importance of his communication, was careful to refrain from definitely attributing to the organism an aetiological function, because he was unable to satisfy, at the time, the rigorous demands for logical proof which, in all his work, he imposed on himself.