lectrons
flame and fall, seeing the ultimate constitution of matter almost
within their grasp, and yet they do not permit their dreams to blind
or weaken them in their wearisome, hopeless quest.

They have their heroism for humanity, too. They meet death face to
face, as they pry close into the cause of decay, the secret of morbid
growth. There is more danger in certain germs than in lions.
Blood-poisoning is to the surgeon a more constant menace than hunger
to an Arctic explorer. These students never know what destroyer they
may unwittingly unloose. Cross-section of abnormal tissue is more
entrancing than a rose-leaf, a cluster of bacilli more beautiful than
a snowflake. They have gone past all creeds, these calm young men, but
they bow before the unspeakable majesty of the unknown. To them the
Hebrew Scriptures are but the tales of minstrels in the childhood of
the race, Mohammed a dreamer of baseless visions, and Christ but
incarnate love in an age of war. The Creator they conceive is too
profound to admit of any attribute. He neither thinks nor feels, and
the life that pulses at the base of the first faint cell is a part of
the same power that binds the stars to their circling suns.

Notwithstanding their daily contact with the most appalling cases of
disease and death, they come and go briskly with jocular greetings on
the stair-ways. They return to their homes each night to read, to
smoke their pipes, deporting themselves like commonplace fathers and
brothers and husbands. They even make love like other men; but,
nevertheless, they may be overtaken in muse like alchemists, subject
to fear and hope like children. To the business-man their ways are
ways of silence and sorcery. Their deep-hid convictions are at
variance with all theories of Christian redemption, and the realities
of their realm more startling than any romance of war or peace. To
them matter is as insoluble as the transforming forces which emanate
from it. They play with nerves, laying bare the beating heart of life,
forever finding, yet forever failing.

To this big, bare building, to one of these barren rooms, Morton
Serviss returned after eight weeks study of the sands and the stars
and the cave-dwellings of vanished men. From the infinitely lonely and
huge and beautiful he cloistered himself to pore upon the habits of
the infinitely small, to listen to the swarming, diminished tumult of
the protozoa. He came back, as usual, brown, alert, and
k