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T first, I tried to find out things about Gorgas from Gorgas, but I gave it up. I beheld in him a man who could not talk about himself. Then I asked friends about him (he has no enemies, at least none who will confess the fact); and they at once fell to talking about his charming manner, his love of humanity, his sympathy with suffering and sorrow. It was difficult to get them off this strain, but at length one man who had worked with the little army doctor for ten years said, thoughtfully:

"He is the most thorough man I ever knew."

That started the character clinic.

"He never loses sight of his objective," analyzed another.

"He is absolutely unmoved by slights, praise, success, defeat-anything except sickness and suffering," spoke up a third.

"He loves his joke: and folks would rather go to his house than anywhere else on the Zone," chimed in a fourth.

Well, here was the personality of the "man who made the canal possible" coming out at last. The quiet, whitehaired, white-mustached army doctor, with the bronzed wrinkled face and gentle voice was a positive sort, after all. He had interests, apparently, other than the mosquito, the rat, and the tropic house fly. And I began to take an interest in William C. Gorgas, the man, where before I had only been concerned with Surgeon-General Gorgas, the greatest sanitarian in the world's history.

As everybody knows, there have been personal controversies in Panama. Between Sibert, who built the permanent structures on the Zone at Gatun, and Goethals, who supervised all the work, no love is lost. The dead Gailliard had his differences with Goethals, too. And these differences permeated the lives of the men and, although they did not interfere with the work or, in any particular. affect the loyalty of the organization to the country, they disturbed the several

sans.

"Gorgas had his troubles, too, but he never paid any attention to them," said one of his colleagues on the Zone. "He kept his goal in mind and proceeded straight toward it. On he went with his mosquito bars, his tile drains, and his scavenger squads. Was someone else's work written up more glowingly than his? It did not bother Gorgas. Did congressional committees quarrel with him because of the money he was spending for sanitation? He secured as nearly as he could what he thought necessary and went ahead."

Gorgas always had to meet the question of money in Panama. You couldn't see the results of his expenditures readily and visiting congressmen did not realize that the groups of blooming children, the

Goethals in this: Goethals supervised everything himself and attended to thousands of minute details; Gorgas worked out a general plan and put the responsibility for its details into the hands of those whom he could trust. Both systems were successful. That is one of the wonders of Panama. While Goethals was always in supreme command, Gorgas was a departmental head and ranked Goethals in the army so that his authority in his work was as great as was that of the chief engineer in all the work.

The achievements of this patient philosophical kindly doctor were based upon the experience Walter Reed,

healthy workers, the clean floor of the Zone were concrete illustrations of what Gorgas had done. Sibert could point to the giant structures of Gatun; Gailliard, to the deepening chasm of Culebra; and Williamson could show the locks at Miraflores and Pedro Miguel as proof of where the money went. Gorgas could have organized an excursion through the French cemeteries as a concrete negative proof of what he was accomplishing, but he didn't do that. He patiently plugged ahead, trying to make the committees understand, and slowly but surely winning their understanding and appreciation and the undying gratitude of the American people.

In sanitation, particularly, genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains, and Gorgas is a genius. His work was thorHis work was thor

of

the army doctor who cleaned Havana by attacking mosquitoes. Gorgas was one of Reed's assistants in Cuba and to him fell the

task of applying the discov

eries of this doctor in the Canal Zone. The result is the Panama Canal, built on the failures of four hundred years and at a cost of human life marvelously small in comparison with the tremendous sacrifices of the French. The Havana campaign was Gorgas' raw material. He forged the tools that purified the Zone and that will forever rob the tropics of their terror for the white man.

First, he kept the American workers in the Zone alive. That was the greatest of his exploits. Then he made the Zone a sanitary paradise and attracted to it the best and most efficient workmen of the world.

During the nine years of the prosecution of canal work by the French, 1041 persons died of yellow fever in Ancon Hospital alone. As the Jamaica negro

Hospital alone.