“I said to myself that, if my theory was true, a sliver put into the body of a starfish larva ... should soon be surrounded by wandering cells....” And he remembered that when men run splinters into their fingers, and neglect to pull them out, those splinters are soon surrounded by pus--which consists largely of the wandering white cells of the blood. He rushed out into the garden back of the cottage, pulled some rose thorns off a little shrub which he had decorated as a Christmas tree for Olga’s brother and sisters; he dashed back into his absurd laboratory and stuck these thorns into the body of one of his water-clear young starfish.... Up he got, at dawn the next morning, full of wild hopes,--and he found his guess had come true. Around the rose-slivers in the starfish were sluggish crawling masses of its wandering cells! Nothing more was necessary (such a jumper at conclusions was he) to stamp into his brain the fixed idea that he now had the explanation of all immunity to diseases; he rushed out that morning to tell famous European professors, who happened then to be in Messina, all about his great idea. “Here is why animals can withstand the attacks of microbes,” he said, and he talked with such enthusiastic eloquence about how the wandering cells of the starfish tried to eat the rose thorns (and he could show it so prettily too) that even the most eminent and pope-like Professor Doctor Virchow (who had sniffed at Koch) believed him! Metchnikoff was now a microbe hunter.... III With Olga and the children flapping along and keeping up as best they could, Metchnikoff hurried to Vienna to proclaim his theory that we are immune to germs because our bodies have wandering cells to gobble germs up; he made a bee-line for the laboratory of his friend, Professor Claus--who was a zoölogist, and knew nothing about microbes either, and so was properly amazed: “I would be greatly honored to have you publish your theory in my Journal,” said Claus. “But I must have a scientific name for these cells that devour microbes--a Greek name--what would be a Greek name for such cells?” cried Metchnikoff. Claus and his learned colleagues scratched their heads and peered into their dictionaries and at last they told him: “Phagocytes! Phagocyte is Greek for devouring cell--phagocytes is what you must call them!” Metchnikoff thanked them, tacked the word “phagocyte” to the head of his mast, and set sail on the seas of his exciting career as a microbe hunter with that word as a religion, an explanation of everything, a slogan, a means of gaining a living--and, though you may not believe it, that word did result in something of a start at finding out how it is we are immune! From then on he preached phagocytes, he defended their reputations, he did some real research on them, he made enemies about them, he doubtless helped to start the war of 1914 with them, by the bad feeling they caused between France and Germany.