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to find a way out, do not commit suicide by stinging themselves to death. He told these horrors in a way to make you feel the remorseless flowing and swallowing of the wandering cells—you could hear the hissing of the doomed and baffled scorpion. . . .
He had brilliant ideas for experiments and was always trying to carry out these ideas—intensely—but at any moment he was ready to drop his science to praise the operas of Mozart or whistle the symphonies of Beethoven, and sometimes he seemed to be more learned about the dramas and the loves of Goethe than about those phagocytes upon which his whole fame rested. He refused to wear a high hat toward lesser men; he would see any one and was ready to believe anything—he even tried the remedies of patent medicine quacks on dying guinea-pigs. And he was a kind man. When his friends were sick he overwhelmed them with delicacies and advice and shed sincere tears on their pillows—so that finally they nicknamed him "Mamma Metchnikoff." His views on the intimate instincts and necessities of life were astoundingly unlike those of any searcher I have ever heard of. "The truth is that artistic genius and perhaps all kinds of genius are closely associated with sexual activity . . . so, for example, an orator speaks better in the presence of a woman to whom he is devoted."
He insisted that he could experiment best when pretty girls were close by!
Metchnikoff's workshop in the Pasteur Institute was more than a mere laboratory; it was a studio, it had the variegated attractions of a country fair; it radiated the verve and gusto of a three-ringed circus. Is it any wonder, then, that young doctors, eager to learn to hunt microbes, flocked to him from all over Europe? Their brains responded to this great searcher who was also a hypnotist, and their fingers flew to perform the ten thousand experiments, ideas for which belched out of the mind of Metchnikoff like an incessant eruption of fireworks.
"Mr. Saltykoff!" he would cry. "This student of Professor