It was a disappointment for the eager boy; however, he did not lose heart but continued to attend divers University lectures, clinging to the hope that another professor might be more sympathetic. He was pleased with the lectures of a young physiologist, Tschelkoff by name, and decided to make another attempt. This time he was successful. The professor received him kindly and consented to give him private lessons in histology. Then, fired with a passionate desire to produce something personal in medical science, and attracted by Virchow's cellular theory, he dreamt that he might create a general theory of his own in medicine. In order to increase his scientific knowledge, he undertook with his friend Zalensky the translation of Grove's work, _The Unity of Physical Forces_. The professor of chemistry and natural history willingly encouraged the two boys in this work, to which they gave up the whole of the school year. Elie wasted no opportunity of learning; during those lectures which did not interest him he used to read scientific books. One day that he was doing so during catechism he did not notice that the priest, wishing to know what he was reading, had come up to him. The latter, however, was greatly impressed by the title of Radlkoffer's learned work on _The Crystals of Proteic Substances_; he returned the book without a word and never interfered with him again. Through the assistance of some medical students, Elie obtained the loan of a microscope; he studied Infusoria and imagined that he had made divers discoveries; he hastened to write an article, and sent it to the only scientific Russian paper then in existence, the _Bulletin of the Moscow Society of Naturalists_. To his great joy his MS. was accepted, but before long the young scientist perceived that his deductions were erroneous, for he had mistaken phenomena of degenerescence for phenomena of development. He was able to stop the publication of this article, the first he ever wrote, and it never appeared. Thanks to Tschelkoff, who lent him a microscope for the duration of the holidays, he was able to study the local fauna of inferior animals. At the beginning of his last year at the Lycée, he read a text-book of geology by a Kharkoff professor and, with juvenile assurance, wrote a critical analysis of it. Inserted in the _Journal de Moscou_, this was Elie's first publication; he was then sixteen years old. Encouraged by this success, he sent several other criticisms, but they were not accepted.