He had brilliant ideas for experiments and was always trying to carry out these ideas--intensely--but at any moment he was ready to drop his science to praise the operas of Mozart or whistle the symphonies of Beethoven, and sometimes he seemed to be more learned about the dramas and the loves of Goethe than about those phagocytes upon which his whole fame rested. He refused to wear a high hat toward lesser men; he would see any one and was ready to believe anything--he even tried the remedies of patent medicine quacks on dying guinea-pigs. And he was a kind man. When his friends were sick he overwhelmed them with delicacies and advice and shed sincere tears on their pillows--so that finally they nicknamed him “Mamma Metchnikoff.” His views on the intimate instincts and necessities of life were astoundingly unlike those of any searcher I have ever heard of. “The truth is that artistic genius and perhaps all kinds of genius are closely associated with sexual activity ... so, for example, an orator speaks better in the presence of a woman to whom he is devoted.” He insisted that he could experiment best when pretty girls were close by! Metchnikoff’s workshop in the Pasteur Institute was more than a mere laboratory; it was a studio, it had the variegated attractions of a country fair; it radiated the verve and gusto of a three-ringed circus. Is it any wonder, then, that young doctors, eager to learn to hunt microbes, flocked to him from all over Europe? Their brains responded to this great searcher who was also a hypnotist, and their fingers flew to perform the ten thousand experiments, ideas for which belched out of the mind of Metchnikoff like an incessant eruption of fireworks. “Mr. Saltykoff!” he would cry. “This student of Professor Pfeiffer in Germany claims that the serum of a guinea-pig will keep other guinea-pigs from dying of hog-cholera. Will you be so good as to perform an experiment to see if that is so?” And the worshiping Saltykoff rushed off--knowing what the master wanted to prove--to show that the German claims were nonsense. For a hundred other intricate tests, for which his own fingers were too impatient, Metchnikoff called upon Blagovestchensky, or Hugenschmidt, or Wagner, or Gheorgiewski, or the now almost forgotten Sawtchenko. Or when these were all busy, then there was Olga to be lured away from her paints and clay models--Olga could be depended upon to prove the most delicate points. In that laboratory there were a hundred hearts that beat as one and a hundred minds with but a single thought--to write the epic of those tiny, roundish, colorless, wandering cells of our blood, those cells, which, smelling from afar the approach of a murderous microbe, swam up the current of the blood, crawled strangely through the walls of the blood vessels to do battle with the germs and so guard us from death.