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immunity to diseases . . . they are what keep the human race from being killed off by malignant bacilli!"

Without one single bit of evidence, without any research at all, Metchnikoff jumped from the digestions of starfish to the ills of men. . . .

"I suddenly became a pathologist," he wrote in his diary (and this was not much more strange than if a cornet player should suddenly announce himself an astrophysicist!) ". . . Feeling that there was in this idea something of surpassing interest, I became so excited that I began striding up and down the room, and even went to the seashore to collect my thoughts."

Now Koch, precise microbe hunter that he was, would hardly have trusted Metchnikoff with the wiping of his microscope, but his ignorance of germs was nothing to this wild Russian.

"I said to myself that, if my theory was true, a sliver put into the body of a starfish larva . . . should soon be surrounded by wandering cells. . . ." And he remembered that when men run splinters into their fingers, and neglect to pull them out, those splinters are soon surrounded by pus—which consists largely of the wandering white cells of the blood. He rushed out into the garden back of the cottage, pulled some rose thorns off a little shrub which he had decorated as a Christmas tree for Olga's brother and sisters; he dashed back into his absurd laboratory and stuck these thorns into the body of one of his water-clear young starfish. . . .

Up he got, at dawn the next morning, full of wild hopes,—and he found his guess had come true. Around the rose-slivers in the starfish were sluggish crawling masses of its wandering cells! Nothing more was necessary (such a jumper at conclusions was he) to stamp into his brain the fixed idea that he now had the explanation of all immunity to diseases; he rushed out that morning to tell famous European professors, who happened then to be in Messina, all about his great idea. "Here is why animals can withstand the attacks of microbes," he said, and he talked with such enthusiastic eloquence about how