But even if the diphtheria antitoxin is not a sure cure, we already know that the experiments of Roux and Behring have not been in vain. It is a story still too recent, too much in the newspapers to be a part of this history--but to-day, in New York under the superb leadership of Dr. Park, and all over America, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of babies and school-children are being ingeniously and safely turned into so many small factories for the making of antitoxin, so that they will never get diphtheria at all. Under the skins of these youngsters go wee doses of that terrible poison fatal to so many big dogs--but it is a poison fantastically changed so that it is harmless to a week-old baby! There is every hope, if fathers and mothers can only be convinced and allow their children to undergo three small safe pricks of a syringe needle, that diphtheria will no longer be the murderer that it has been for ages. And for this men will thank those first crude searchings of Loeffler and Roux and Behring. CHAPTER VII METCHNIKOFF THE NICE PHAGOCYTES I Microbe hunting has always been a queer humpty-dumpty business. A janitor with no proper education was the first man to see microbes; a chemist put them on the map and made people properly afraid of them; a country doctor turned the hunting of them into something that came near to being a science; to save the lives of babies from the poison of one of the deadliest of them, a Frenchman and a German had to pile up mountains of butchered guinea-pigs and rabbits. Microbe hunting is a story of amazing stupidities, fine intuitions, insane paradoxes. If that is the history of the hunting of microbes, it is the same with the story of the science, still in its babyhood, of why we are immune to microbes. For Metchnikoff, the always excited searcher who in a manner of speaking founded that science--this Metchnikoff was not a sober scientific investigator; he was more like some hysterical character out of one of Dostoevski’s novels. Élie Metchnikoff was a Jew, and was born in southern Russia in 1845, and before he was twenty years old, he said: “I have zeal and ability, I am naturally talented--I am ambitious to become a distinguished investigator!”