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a lifetime to write. It was written in a style Flaubert might have envied. He made every one of the ten thousand facts in it vivid, and every one of them was twisted prettily to prove his point. It is a strange novel with a myriad of heroes—the wandering cells, the phagocytes of all the animals of the earth.

His fame made him take a real delight in being alive. Twenty years before, detesting the human race, sorry for himself, and hating life, he had told Olga: "It is a crime to have children—no human being should consciously reproduce himself." But now that he had begun to take delight in existence, the children of Sèvres, the suburb where he lived, called him "Grandpa Christmas" as he patted their heads and gave them candy. "Life is good!" he told himself. But how to hang onto it, now that it was slipping away so fast? In only one way, of course—by science!

"Disease is only an episode!" he wrote. "It is not enough to cure (he had discovered no cures) . . . it is necessary to find out what the destiny of man is, and why he must grow old and die when his desire to live is strongest." Then Metchnikoff abandoned work on his dead phagocytes and set out to found fantastic sciences to explain man's destiny, and to avoid it. To one of these, the science of old age, he gave the sonorous name "Gerontology," and he gave the name "Thanatology" to the science of death. What awful sciences they were; the ideas were optimistic; the observations he made in them were so inaccurate that old Leeuwenhoek would have turned over in his grave had he known about them; the experiments Metchnikoff made, to support these sciences, would have caused Pasteur to foam with indignation that he had ever welcomed this outlandish Russian to his laboratory. And yet—and yet—the way really to prevent one of the most hideous microbic diseases came out of them. . . .

Metchnikoff dreaded the idea of dying but knew that he and everybody else would have to—so he set out to devise a hope (there was not one particle of science in this) for an easy death. Somewhere in his vast hungry readings, he had run across the