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Pfeiffer in Germany claims that the serum of a guinea-pig will keep other guinea-pigs from dying of hog-cholera. Will you be so good as to perform an experiment to see if that is so?" And the worshiping Saltykoff rushed off—knowing what the master wanted to prove—to show that the German claims were nonsense. For a hundred other intricate tests, for which his own fingers were too impatient, Metchnikoff called upon Blagovestchensky, or Hugenschmidt, or Wagner, or Gheorgiewski, or the now almost forgotten Sawtchenko. Or when these were all busy, then there was Olga to be lured away from her paints and clay models—Olga could be depended upon to prove the most delicate points. In that laboratory there were a hundred hearts that beat as one and a hundred minds with but a single thought—to write the epic of those tiny, roundish, colorless, wandering cells of our blood, those cells, which, smelling from afar the approach of a murderous microbe, swam up the current of the blood, crawled strangely through the walls of the blood vessels to do battle with the germs and so guard us from death.
The great medical congresses of those brave days were exciting debating societies about microbes, about immunity, and it was in the weeks before a congress (Metchnikoff always went to them) that his laboratory buzzed with an infernal rushing to and fro. "We must hurry," Metchnikoff exclaimed, "to make all of the experiments necessary to support my arguments!" The crowd of adoring assistants then slept two hours less each night; Metchnikoff rolled up his sleeves, too, and seized a syringe. Young rhinoceros beetles, green frogs, alligators, or weird Mexican axolotls were brought from the animal house by the sweating helpers (sometimes the ponds were dredged for perch and gudgeon). Then the mad philosopher, his eyes alight, his broad face so red that it glowed like some smoldering brush-fire under his beard, his mustaches full of bacilli spattered into it by his excited and poetic gestures—this Metchnikoff, I say, proceeded to inject swarms of microbes into one or another of his uncomplaining, cold-blooded me-