He went to the University of Kharkoff, borrowed the then rare microscope from one of his professors, and after peering (more or less dimly) through it, this ambitious young man sat himself down and wrote long scientific papers before he had any idea at all of what science was. He bolted his classes for months on end, not to play, but to read; not to read novels mind you but to wallow through learned works on the “Crystals of Proteic Substances” and to become passionate about inflammatory pamphlets whose discovery by the police would have sent him to the mines in Siberia. He sat up nights, drinking gallons of tea and haranguing his young colleagues (all of them forefathers of the present Bolsheviki) on atheism until they nicknamed him “God-Is-Not.” Then, a few days before the end of the term, he crammed up the neglected lessons of months; and his prodigious memory, which was more like some weird phonograph record than any human brain, made it possible for him to write home to his folks that he had passed first and got a gold medal. Metchnikoff was always trying to get ahead of himself. He sent papers to scientific journals while he was still in his teens; he wrote these papers frantically a few hours after he had trained his microscope on some bug or beetle; the next day he would look at them again, and find that what he had been so certain of, was not quite the same now. Hastily he wrote to the editor of the scientific journal: “Please do not publish the manuscript I sent you yesterday. I find I have made a mistake.” At other times he was furious because his enthusiastic discoveries were turned down by the editors. “The world does not appreciate me!” he cried, and he went to his room, ready to die, dolefully whistling: “Were I small as a snail, I would hide myself in my shell.” But if Metchnikoff sobbed because his vivid talents were underestimated by his professors, he was also irrepressible. He forgot his contemplated suicides and his violent headaches in his incessant interest in all living things, but he was constantly spoiling his chances to do a good steady piece of scientific work by getting into quarrels with his teachers. Finally he told his mother (who had always spoiled him and believed in him): “I am especially interested in the study of protoplasm ... but there is no science in Russia,” so he rushed off to the University of Würzburg in Germany, only to find that he had arrived there six weeks ahead of the opening of school. He sought out some Russian students there, but they gave him the cold shoulder--he was a Jew--then, tired of life, he started back home, thinking of killing himself but with a few books in his satchel--and one of these was the just-published “Origin of Species” of Darwin. He read it, he swallowed the Theory of Organic Evolution with one great mental gulp, he became a bigoted supporter of it--from then on evolution was his religion until he began founding new scientific religions of his own.