[D]iscovery should come as an adventure rather than as the result of a logical process of thought. Sharp, prolonged thinking is necessary that we may keep on the chosen road but it does not itself necessarily lead to discovery. The investigator must be ready and on the spot when the light comes from whatever direction.

Controlled research … endeavors to pick out of the web of nature’s activities some single strand and trace it towards its origin and its terminus and determine its relation to other strands.

In general, a fact is worth more than theories in the long run. The theory stimulates, but the fact builds. The former in due time is replaced by one better but the fact remains and becomes fertile.

It is incumbent upon us to keep training and pruning the tree of knowledge without looking to the right or the left.

It is the care we bestow on apparently trifling, unattractive and very troublesome minutiae which determines the result.

It is the care we bestow on apparently trifling, unattractive detail and very troublesome minutiae which determines the result.

More and more of out colleagues fail to understand our work because of the high specialization of research problems. We must not be discouraged if the products of our labor are not read or even known to exist. The joy of research must be found in doing since every other harvest is uncertain.

No research will answer all queries that the future may raise. It is wiser to praise the work for what it has accomplished and then to formulate the problems still to be solved.

Research cannot be forced very much. There is always danger of too much foliage and too little fruit.

Research has deserted the individual and entered the group. The individual worker find the problem too large, not too difficult. He must learn to work with others.

Research is fundamentally a state of mind involving continual re­examination of doctrines and axioms upon which current thought and action are based. It is, therefore, critical of existing practices.

The universality of parasitism as an offshoot of the predatory habit negatives the position taken by man that it is a pathological phenomenon or a deviation from the normal processes of nature. The pathological manifestations are only incidents in a developing parasitism. As human beings intent on maintaining man's domination over nature we may regard parasitism as pathological insofar as it becomes a drain upon human resources. In our efforts to protect ourselves we may make every kind of sacrifice to limit, reduce, and even eliminate parasitism as a factor in human life. Science attempts to define the terms on which this policy of elimination may or may not succeed. We must first of all thoroughly understand the problem, put ourselves in possession of all the facts in order to estimate the cost. Too often it has been assumed that parasitism was abnormal and that it needed only a slight force to reestablish what was believed to be a normal equilibrium without parasitism. On the contrary, biology teaches us that parasitism is a normal phenomenon and if we accept this view we shall be more ready to pay the price of freedom as a permanent and ever recurring levy of nature for immunity from a condition to which all life is subject. The greatest victory of man over nature in the physical realm would undoubtedly be his own delivery from the heavy encumbrance of parasitism with which all life is burdened.

While the nature of Texas fever is by no means made clear as yet, we are able to affirm that ticks can produce it. Whether the disease can be transmitted by any other agency must be decided by future investigations. Meanwhile the evidence accumulated thus far seems to favor very strongly the dictum: No ticks, no Texas fever.