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shrewdly: "I am only a theoretician; I am overwhelmed with researches—some one else will have to be trained to make vaccines, to do the practical work."
Nobody in Odessa knew anything about microbe hunting then, so Metchnikoff's friend, Doctor Gamaléia, was sent to the Pasteur Institute in Paris posthaste. The citizens were anxious to begin to be prevented from having diseases; they bawled for vaccines. So Gamaléia, after a little while in Paris, where he watched Roux and Pasteur and learned a great deal from them, but not quite enough—this Gamaléia came back and started to make anthrax vaccines for the sheep of the Zemstvo, and rabies vaccines for the people of the town. "All should now go very well!" cried Metchnikoff (he knew nothing of the nasty tricks virulent microbes can play) and he retired to his theoretical fastnesses to grapple with rabbits and dogs and monkeys, to see if their phagocytes would swallow the microbes of consumption and relapsing fever and erysipelas. Scientific papers vomited from his laboratory, and the searchers of Europe began to be excited by the discoveries of this strange genius in the south of Russia. But he began to have troubles with his theory, for dogs and rabbits and monkeys—alas—are not transparent, like water fleas. . . .
Then the shambles began. Gamaléia and the other members of Metchnikoff's practical staff began to fight among themselves and mix up vaccines; microbes spilled out of tubes; the doctors of the town—naturally a little jealous of this new form of healing—started to snoop into the laboratory, to ask embarrassing questions, to start whispers going through the town: "Who is this Professor Metchnikoff—he hasn't even a doctor's certificate. He is only a naturalist, a mere bug-hunter—how can he know anything about preventing diseases?"
"Where are those cures?" demanded the people. "Give us our preventions!" shouted the farmers—who had gone down into their socks for good roubles. Metchnikoff came out of the fog of his theory of phagocytes for a moment, and tried to satisfy them by sowing chicken cholera bacilli among the