LIFE OF ELIE METCHNIKOFF 33 



doing so during catechism he did not notice that the 

 priest, wishing to know what he was reading, had 

 come up to him. The latter, however, was greatly im- 

 pressed by the title of RadlkofEer's learned work on 

 The Crystals of Proteic Substances ; he returned the 

 book without a word and never interfered with him 

 again. 



Through the assistance of some medical students, 

 Elie obtained the loan of a microscope ; he studied 

 Infusoria and imagined that he had made divers 

 discoveries ; he hastened to write an article, and sent 

 it to the only scientific Russian paper then in existence, 

 the Bulletin of the Moscow Society of Naturalists. To 

 his great joy his MS. was accepted, but before long 

 the young scientist perceived that his deductions were 

 erroneous, for he had mistaken phenomena of degener- 

 escence for phenomena of development. He was able 

 to stop the publication of this article, the first he ever 

 wrote, and it never appeared. 



Thanks to Tschelkoff, who lent him a microscope 

 for the duration of the holidays, he was able to study 

 the local fauna of inferior animals. At the beginning 

 of his last year at the Lycee, he read a text-book of 

 geology by a Kharkoff professor and, with juvenile 

 assurance, wrote a critical analysis of it. Inserted in 

 the Journal de Moscou, this was Elie's first publica- 

 tion ; he was then sixteen years old. Encouraged 

 by this success, he sent several other criticisms, but 

 they were not accepted. 



The last examinations were coming near : Elie 

 wished to obtain the gold medal, not only out of pride, 

 but in order to prove to his parents that he deserved 

 their assistance in order to go abroad to continue his 

 studies. He therefore provisionally suspended his 



D 



