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two years after the death of Ludmilla, he had met Olga, a bright girl of fifteen, the daughter of a man of property. "His appearance is not unlike that of the Christ—he is so pale and seems so sad," whispered Olga. Soon after they were married.

From then on Metchnikoff's life was much less disastrous; he tried far less often to commit suicide; his hands began to catch up with his precocious brain—he was learning to do experiments. Never was there a man who tried more sincerely to apply his religion (which was science) to every part of his life. He took Olga in hand and taught her science and art, and even the art and science of marriage! She worshiped the profound certainties that science gave him, but said, long afterwards: "The scientific methods which Metchnikoff applied to everything might have been a grave mistake at this delicate psychological moment. . . ."

It was in 1883, when the discoveries of Pasteur and Koch had made everybody mad about microbes, that Metchnikoff turned suddenly from a naturalist into a microbe hunter. He had wrangled with the authorities of the University of Odessa, and departed for the Island of Sicily with Olga and her crowd of little brothers and sisters, and here he set up his amateur laboratory in the parlor of their cottage looking across the magic water to the blue Calabrian shore. His intuition told him that microbes were now the thing in science and he dreamed about making great discoveries of new microbes—he was sincerely interested in them as well, but he knew nothing about the subtle ways of hunting them, indeed he had hardly seen a germ. He stamped about his parlor-laboratory, expounding biological theories to Olga, studying starfish and sponges, telling the children fairy stories, doing everything in short that was as far as possible removed from those thrilling researches of Koch and Pasteur. . . .