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live to be more than a hundred. Metchnikoff didn't go down there to see—he believed it. These ancient people lived principally upon sour milk, so went the story. "Ah! there's the explanation," he muttered. He put the youngsters in his laboratory to studying the microbe that made milk sour—and in a little while the notorious Bulgarian bacillus made its bow in the rank of patent medicines.

"This germ," explained Metchnikoff, "by making the acid of sour milk, will chase the wild poisonous bacilli out of the intestine." He began drinking huge draughts of sour milk himself, and later, for years, he fed himself cultivations of the Bulgarian bacillus. He wrote large books about his new theory and a serious English journal acclaimed them to be the most important scientific treatises since Darwin's "Origin of Species." The Bulgarian bacillus became a rage, companies were formed, and their directors grew rich off selling these silly bacilli. Metchnikoff let them use his name (though Olga insists he never made a franc from that) for the label.

For nearly twenty years Metchnikoff austerely lived to the letter of his new theory. He neither drank alcoholic drinks nor did he smoke. He permitted himself no debaucheries. He was examined incessantly by the most renowned specialists of the age. His rolls were sent to him in separate sterilized paper bags so that they would be free from the wild, auto-intoxicating bacilli. He constantly tested his various juices and excretions. In those years he got down untold gallons of sour milk and swallowed billions of the beneficent bacilli of Bulgaria. . . .

And he died at the age of seventy-one.