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Microbe hunting has always been a queer humpty-dumpty business.

A janitor with no proper education was the first man to see microbes; a chemist put them on the map and made people properly afraid of them; a country doctor turned the hunting of them into something that came near to being a science; to save the lives of babies from the poison of one of the deadliest of them, a Frenchman and a German had to pile up mountains of butchered guinea-pigs and rabbits. Microbe hunting is a story of amazing stupidities, fine intuitions, insane paradoxes. If that is the history of the hunting of microbes, it is the same with the story of the science, still in its babyhood, of why we are immune to microbes. For Metchnikoff, the always excited searcher who in a manner of speaking founded that science—this Metchnikoff was not a sober scientific investigator; he was more like some hysterical character out of one of Dostoevski’s novels.

Élie Metchnikoff was a Jew, and was born in southern Russia in 1845, and before he was twenty years old, he said: “I have zeal and ability, I am naturally talented—I am ambitious to become a distinguished investigator!”

He went to the University of Kharkoff, borrowed the then rare microscope from one of his professors, and after peering (more or less dimly) through it, this ambitious young man sat himself down and wrote long scientific papers before he had