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you—raised a great clamor against these experiments of Metchnikoff. "It will remove the penalty of immorality!" said they, "to spread abroad such an easy and a perfect means of prevention!" But Metchnikoff only answered: "It has been objected that the attempt to prevent the spread of this disease is immoral. But since all means of moral prophylaxis have not prevented the great spread of syphilis and the contamination of innocents, the immoral thing is to restrain any available means we have of combating this plague."

Meanwhile he was scheming and groping about and having dreams about other things that might cause the arteries to harden, and suddenly he invented another cause—surely no one can say he discovered it!—"auto-intoxication, poisoning from the wild, putrefying bacilli in our large intestines—that is surely a cause of the hardening of the arteries, that is what helps us to grow old too soon!" he cried. He devised chemical tests—what awful ones they were—that would show whether the body was being poisoned from the intestine. "We would live much longer," he said, "if we had no large intestine, indeed, two people are on record, who had their large intestine cut out, and live perfectly well without it." Strange to say, he did not advocate cutting the bowels out of every one, but he set about thinking up ways of making things there uncomfortable for the "wild bacilli."

His theory was a strange one, and caused laughter and jeers and he began to get into trouble again. People wrote in, reminding him that elephants had enormous large intestines but lived to be a hundred in spite of them; that the human race, in spite of its large intestine, was one of the longest-lived species on earth. He engaged in vast obscene arguments about why evolution has allowed animals to keep a large intestine—then suddenly he hit on his great remedy for auto-intoxication. There were villages in Bulgaria where people were alleged to