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off to the University of Würzburg in Germany, only to find that he had arrived there six weeks ahead of the opening of school. He sought out some Russian students there, but they gave him the cold shoulder—he was a Jew—then, tired of life, he started back home, thinking of killing himself but with a few books in his satchel—and one of these was the just-published "Origin of Species" of Darwin. He read it, he swallowed the Theory of Organic Evolution with one great mental gulp, he became a bigoted supporter of it—from then on evolution was his religion until he began founding new scientific religions of his own.

He forgot his plans for suicide; he planned strange evolutionary researches; he lay awake nights, seeing visions—huge panoramas they were, of all beasts from cockroaches to elephants, as the children of some one remote and infinitely tiny ancestor. . . .

That conversion was Metchnikoff's real start in life, for now he set out (and kept at it for ten years), quarreling and expostulating his way from one laboratory to another, from Russia through Germany to Italy, and from Italy to the island of Heligoland. He worked at the evolution of worms. He accused the distinguished German zoölogist Leuckart of stealing his stuff; incurably clumsy with his fingers, he clawed desperately into a lizard to find the story of evolution its insides might tell him—and when he could not find what he wanted, he threw what was left of the reptile across the laboratory. Unlike Koch or Leeuwenhoek, who were great because they knew how to ask questions of nature, Metchnikoff read books on Evolution, was inspired, shouted "Yes!" and then by vast sloppy experiments proceeded to try to force his beliefs down nature's throat. Strange to say, sometimes he was right, importantly right as you will see. Up till now (it was in the late eighteen seventies) he knew nothing about microbes, but all the time his mania to prove the survival of the fittest was driving him toward his fantastic theory—partly true—of how mankind resists the assaults of germs.