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Metchnikoff's first thirty-five years were a hubbub and a perilously near disastrous groping toward this event—toward that great notoriety that waited for him on the Island of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea. At twenty-three he had married Ludmilla Feodorovitch, who was a consumptive and had to be carried to the wedding in an invalid's chair. Then followed a pitiful four years for them. They dragged about Europe, looking for a cure; Metchnikoff trying in odd moments snatched from an irritatedly tender nursing of his wife, to do experiments on the development of green flies and sponges and worms and scorpions—trying above all to make some sensational discovery which might land him a well-paid professorship. "The survivors are not the best but the most cunning," he whispered, as he published his scientific papers and pulled his wires. . . .

Finally Ludmilla died; she had spent her last days solaced by morphine, and now Metchnikoff, who had caught the habit from her, wandered from her grave through Spain to Geneva, taking larger and larger doses of the drug—meanwhile, his eyes hurt him terribly, and what is a naturalist, a searcher, without eyes?

"Why live?" he cried, and took a dose of morphine that he knew must kill him, but the dose was too large, he became nauseated and threw it up. "Why live?" he cried again and took a hot bath and rushed out in the open air right afterwards to try to catch his death of pneumonia. But it seems that the wise witty gods who fashion searchers had other purposes for him. That very night he stopped, agape at the spectacle of a cloud of insects swirling round the flame of a lantern. "These insects live only a few hours!" he cried to himself. "How can the theory of the survival of the fittest be applied to them?" So he plunged back into his experiments.

Metchnikoff's grief was terrific but it did not last long. He was appointed Professor at the University of Odessa, and there he taught the Survival of the Fittest and became respected for his learning, and grew in dignity, and in less than