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venting more or less accurate experiments which showed that these microbe-killing things came from the phagocytes, after all. Bordet did not remain long in Metchnikoff's laboratory. . . .

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, when romantic microbe hunting began to turn into a regular profession, recruited from good steady law-abiding young doctors who were not prophets or reckless searchers—in those days Metchnikoff's bitter trials with people who didn't believe him began to be less terrible. He received medals and prizes of money, and even the Germans clapped their hands and were respectful when he walked majestically into some congress. A thousand searchers had spied phagocytes in the act of gobbling harmful germs—and although that did not explain at all why one man dies from an attack of pneumonia microbes, while another breaks into a sweat and gets better—just the same there is no doubt that pneumonia germs are sometimes eaten and so got rid of by phagocytes. So Metchnikoff, after you discount his amazing illogic, his intolerance, his bullheadedness, really did discover a fact which may make life easier for suffering mankind. Because, some day, a dreamer, an experimenting genius like the absent-minded Bordet may come along—and he may solve the riddle of why phagocytes sometimes gobble germs and sometimes do not—he might even teach phagocytes always to eat them. . . .

At last Metchnikoff began really to be happy. His opponents were partly convinced, and partly they stopped arguing with him because they found it was no use—he could always experiment more tirelessly than they, he could talk longer, he could expostulate more loudly. So Metchnikoff, at the beginning of the twentieth century, sat down to write a great book on all that he had found out about why we are immune. It was an enormous treatise you would think it would take