As he only had to go to his new post in the autumn, he went for the summer to St. Vaast in Normandy to study Lucernaria; unfortunately the stay was not a success; the weather was cold and the sea very rough, which made the Lucernaria impossible to find. Life conditions were very difficult, all the male population being at sea and the women being in the fields. In order not to waste this journey he studied Ascidians, and found that he had previously been mistaken at Naples when he thought that the nervous system of those animals originated from the lower embryonic layer. Kovalevsky had been right in affirming the contrary, and Elie hastened to write to tell him so. St. Vaast, open to every wind, was not favourable to the patient, and Metchnikoff had to take her away. They went to Russia to stay with her parents and then to Panassovka. The doctors having advised a course of treatment by "koumiss," or fermented mare's milk prepared in a special way by the Tartars, Elie engaged a Tartar servant specially for that purpose, but in vain. In spite of every treatment, his wife's health was steadily growing worse. The cold at St. Vaast had been followed by such a dry heat in Russia that, in order to procure a little coolness for the patient, they had to spread wet sheets around her. She constantly had high temperatures and frequent attacks of hæmorrhage. It was obvious that she must leave Russia, and Metchnikoff, obliged to rejoin his post at Odessa, asked Mlle. Fédorovitch to go with her to Montreux. The separation was all the harder that all hope of recovery was beginning to wane. The patient, however, had been told of the magical effect of Madeira in cases of tuberculosis, and she clung to the idea as to a plank of safety. Elie resolved to take her there. He set to work with renewed ardour in order to obtain the sum necessary for the journey; in spite of all his self-denial, his normal resources would not have sufficed, and he had recourse to translations and literary articles. He had a theme ready, which he developed in a paper called _Education from the Anthropological Point of View_--in fact a preliminary sketch of his ideas on the disharmonies in human nature. In it, he analysed the disharmonies due to the great difference of development between the child and the adult: whilst the young of animals are very rapidly able to imitate the adults and to live like them, the man-child is incapable of it. His brain, especially in civilised races, demands a long period of development in order to equal that of the adult, whilst certain instincts in the organism mature, on the contrary, long before their function is possible. Moreover, a child's sensibility is extremely developed whilst his will is by no means so. These causes provoke suffering and a series of regrettable consequences.