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Here Metchnikoff had peeped prettily into a thrilling, deadly struggle on a tiny scale, he had spied upon the up till now completely mysterious way in which certain living creatures defend themselves against their would-be assassins. His observations were true as steel, and you will have to grant they were devilishly ingenious, for who would have thought to look for the why of immunity in such an absurd beast as the water flea? Now Metchnikoff needed nothing more to convince him of the absolute and final rightness of his theory, he probed no deeper into this struggle (which Koch would have spent years over) but wrote a learned paper:

"The immunity of the water flea, due to the help of its phagocytes, is an example of natural immunity . . . for, once the wandering cells have not swallowed the yeast spore at the moment of its penetration into the body, the yeast germinates . . . secretes a poison which drives the phagocytes back not only, but kills them by dissolving them completely."

Then Metchnikoff went to see if this same battle took place in frogs and rabbits, and suddenly, in 1886, the Russian people were thrilled by Pasteur's saving of sixteen of their folk from the bite of the mad wolf. The good people of Odessa and the farmers of the Zemstvo round about gave thanks to God, hurrahs for Pasteur, and a mighty purse of roubles for a laboratory to be started at once in Odessa. And Metchnikoff was appointed Scientific Director of the new Institute—for had not this man (they forgot for a moment he was Jewish) studied in all the Universities of Europe, and had he not lectured learnedly to the doctors of Odessa, telling about the phagocytes of the blood, which gobble microbes?

"Who knows?" you can hear the people saying. "Maybe in our new Institute, Professor Metchnikoff can train these little phagocytes to gobble up all microbes?"

Metchnikoff accepted the position, but told the authorities,