1 QQ Mathews and a few like him) and consequently, not being able 

 to judge your work and being too damned lazy to look up the 

 dope on it, they dismissed it. Now, having received elementary 

 instruction in the Field they are better able to see that perhaps 

 your work has something to it — but of course not such a 

 sweeping damned lot as you claim. Rosie examined me about 

 1 days ago and seemed to think that I was all right. Wish you 

 could be here too. But I must close, for Marie & I swore yes- 

 terday to cease talking about our childhood days. Give my love 

 to everybody and tell them that if Cincinnatians weren't so 

 lazy, Chicago wouldn't be able to put it over them in any way 

 that I can see. 



One product of Wherry's experience in Chicago was a 

 renewal and a deepening of his friendship with Jordan; an- 

 other, a meeting with M W Beijerinck. The two world names 

 on variation in microorganisms as inducible through change 

 in environment, thus stood side by side. Beijerinck bid Wherry 

 follow him to Holland to demonstrate his findings there; but 

 still wretched after the experiences of the winter he wisely 

 decided to stop with his family in Woods Hole. The product 

 of this vacation was another paper [50], this time with G L 

 Kite on the mechanism of phagocytosis. Amoebae and the free 

 swimming white cells of the blood had always been endowed 

 with a sort of intelligence — they "chose" their foods and 

 swallowed them or not, as they deemed fit. Wherry thought 

 the matter overdone. He suggested instead that it was all a 

 matter of accident. The surfaces of the white blood corpuscles 

 were "sticky" and when brought in contact with foreign 

 particles (like carbon, carmin or the bacteria) just naturally 

 picked these up. It was a matter of chance meeting merely 

 between the two; and the degree of this stickiness. There were 

 rules to the game but they weren't psychological rules. Some 

 leucocytes would swallow bacteria no matter what their kind 

 or state. Others had to be coaxed. He reverted to his medical 

 school studies to ask about the "opsonins." They turned out 

 to be materials present in blood which so changed the bacteria 

 involved that this relative stickiness between surface of 

 leucocyte and surface of germ was made just right for the 

 engulfment act. 



