wer. Hope suddenly surged back into his soul. He felt dizzy and faint.
Could a similar fate have caused the unaccountable silence of the
enemy's cannonade? Even as the thought came to him, he knew it must be
so. His marvelous old friend, Dr. Rutledge, had risen to the need of the
world and crushed the yellow menace.

* * * * *

Such, truly, had been the case. In a single hour, through the agency of
a harmless food, the subtle scientist had crushed a nation. The
principle involved had been discovered nearly two centuries before, when
it was well-known that if an animal were injected with a small quantity
of a protein foreign to his body, a subsequent dose a hundred million
times as weak would cause its immediate and violent death. Even the
quantity that might be flying in the atmosphere and become dissolved in
the fluids of the nose or eyes would act as the most virulent of known
poisons. Through the ages, however, the human race had more or less come
in contact with all the proteins in their world and hence rarely became
highly sensitized to any protein occurring in nature. The terrible
toxicity of a protein which had never before occurred in nature and to
whose power mankind had never been even partially desensitized had up to
the time of Dr. Rutledge only entered the minds of a few scientists. His
strategy was the working out of a new maxim: Nature is terrible, but man
makes it more so.

* * * * *

Foreign protein sensitization or anaphylaxis was the basis of Dr.
Rutledge's coup. The laws governing this reaction had been more or less
worked out by a group of scientists in the twentieth century. They had
demonstrated that if a guinea-pig or rabbit were injected with the blood
serum of another species, a subsequent dose of an infinitely small
quantity of this substance would cause convulsions, collapse and rapid
death. Inasmuch as there were many proteins in the atmosphere at that
time due to the unrestrained pollination of plants of every description,
it was not surprising that they found as many as ten per cent of the
white race afflicted with a slight pollen sensitivity which showed up
seasonally by causing spasms of the smooth muscle of the respiratory
system, a disease popularly called "hay-fever."

Since, however, the proteins of the world had always been present, the
human race had, by constantly coming into contact with them, become more
or less