He forgot his plans for suicide; he planned strange evolutionary researches; he lay awake nights, seeing visions--huge panoramas they were, of all beasts from cockroaches to elephants, as the children of some one remote and infinitely tiny ancestor.... That conversion was Metchnikoff’s real start in life, for now he set out (and kept at it for ten years), quarreling and expostulating his way from one laboratory to another, from Russia through Germany to Italy, and from Italy to the island of Heligoland. He worked at the evolution of worms. He accused the distinguished German zoölogist Leuckart of stealing his stuff; incurably clumsy with his fingers, he clawed desperately into a lizard to find the story of evolution its insides might tell him--and when he could not find what he wanted, he threw what was left of the reptile across the laboratory. Unlike Koch or Leeuwenhoek, who were great because they knew how to ask questions of nature, Metchnikoff read books on Evolution, was inspired, shouted “Yes!” and then by vast sloppy experiments proceeded to try to force his beliefs down nature’s throat. Strange to say, sometimes he was right, importantly right as you will see. Up till now (it was in the late eighteen seventies) he knew nothing about microbes, but all the time his mania to prove the survival of the fittest was driving him toward his fantastic theory--partly true--of how mankind resists the assaults of germs. Metchnikoff’s first thirty-five years were a hubbub and a perilously near disastrous groping toward this event--toward that great notoriety that waited for him on the Island of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea. At twenty-three he had married Ludmilla Feodorovitch, who was a consumptive and had to be carried to the wedding in an invalid’s chair. Then followed a pitiful four years for them. They dragged about Europe, looking for a cure; Metchnikoff trying in odd moments snatched from an irritatedly tender nursing of his wife, to do experiments on the development of green flies and sponges and worms and scorpions--trying above all to make some sensational discovery which might land him a well-paid professorship. “The survivors are not the best but the most cunning,” he whispered, as he published his scientific papers and pulled his wires.... Finally Ludmilla died; she had spent her last days solaced by morphine, and now Metchnikoff, who had caught the habit from her, wandered from her grave through Spain to Geneva, taking larger and larger doses of the drug--meanwhile, his eyes hurt him terribly, and what is a naturalist, a searcher, without eyes?