“Why live?” he cried, and took a dose of morphine that he knew must kill him, but the dose was too large, he became nauseated and threw it up. “Why live?” he cried again and took a hot bath and rushed out in the open air right afterwards to try to catch his death of pneumonia. But it seems that the wise witty gods who fashion searchers had other purposes for him. That very night he stopped, agape at the spectacle of a cloud of insects swirling round the flame of a lantern. “These insects live only a few hours!” he cried to himself. “How can the theory of the survival of the fittest be applied to them?” So he plunged back into his experiments. Metchnikoff’s grief was terrific but it did not last long. He was appointed Professor at the University of Odessa, and there he taught the Survival of the Fittest and became respected for his learning, and grew in dignity, and in less than two years after the death of Ludmilla, he had met Olga, a bright girl of fifteen, the daughter of a man of property. “His appearance is not unlike that of the Christ--he is so pale and seems so sad,” whispered Olga. Soon after they were married. From then on Metchnikoff’s life was much less disastrous; he tried far less often to commit suicide; his hands began to catch up with his precocious brain--he was learning to do experiments. Never was there a man who tried more sincerely to apply his religion (which was science) to every part of his life. He took Olga in hand and taught her science and art, and even the art and science of marriage! She worshiped the profound certainties that science gave him, but said, long afterwards: “The scientific methods which Metchnikoff applied to everything might have been a grave mistake at this delicate psychological moment....” II It was in 1883, when the discoveries of Pasteur and Koch had made everybody mad about microbes, that Metchnikoff turned suddenly from a naturalist into a microbe hunter. He had wrangled with the authorities of the University of Odessa, and departed for the Island of Sicily with Olga and her crowd of little brothers and sisters, and here he set up his amateur laboratory in the parlor of their cottage looking across the magic water to the blue Calabrian shore. His intuition told him that microbes were now the thing in science and he dreamed about making great discoveries of new microbes--he was sincerely interested in them as well, but he knew nothing about the subtle ways of hunting them, indeed he had hardly seen a germ. He stamped about his parlor-laboratory, expounding biological theories to Olga, studying starfish and sponges, telling the children fairy stories, doing everything in short that was as far as possible removed from those thrilling researches of Koch and Pasteur....