Neither side would budge from this extreme, prejudiced position. For twenty years both sides were so enraged they could not stop to think that perhaps both our blood _and_ our phagocytes might work together to guard us from germs. That fight was a kind of magnificent but undignified shouting of “You’re a liar--On the contrary, it’s you that’s the liar!” which blinded Metchnikoff and his opponents to the idea that it might be neither the blood nor the phagocytes which are at the bottom of our resistance to some diseases. If they had only stopped for a moment, wiped their brows and cleaned the blood from their mental noses, to remember how little they knew, how slowly they should go--considering what subtle complicated stuff this blood and those phagocytes are--if they had only remembered how foolish, in the darkness of their ignorance, it was to cook up any explanation at all of why we are immune! If Metchnikoff had only kept on, obscure in Odessa, with his beautiful researches on the why of the wandering cells of the water fleas eating up those terrible little yeasts.... If he had only been patient and tried to get to the bottom of that! But the stumbling strides of microbe hunters are not made by any perfect logic, and that is the reason I may write a grotesque, but not perfect story of their deeds. In the grand days of Pasteur’s fight with anthrax and his victory against rabies, he had worked like some subterranean distiller of secret poisons, with only Roux and Chamberland and one or two others to help him. In that dingy laboratory in the Rue d’Ulm he had been very impolite, even nasty, to all curious intruders and ambitious persons. He even chased adoring pretty ladies away. But Metchnikoff! Here was an entirely different sort of searcher. Metchnikoff had an immensely impressive beard and a broad forehead that crowned eyes which squinted vividly--and intelligently--from behind his spectacles. His hair grew down over the back of his neck in a way that showed you he was too deep in thoughts to think of having it cut. He knew everything! He could tell--and it was authentic--of countless biological mysteries; he had seen the wandering cells of a tadpole turn it into a frog by eating the tadpole’s tail, and he had built circles of fire around scorpions to show that these unhappy creatures, failing to find a way out, do not commit suicide by stinging themselves to death. He told these horrors in a way to make you feel the remorseless flowing and swallowing of the wandering cells--you could hear the hissing of the doomed and baffled scorpion....