Russia's Contribution to Science. 239 



forming work because in it the Ascidians were for the first time 

 shown to be of chordate nature ; his "Embryological Studies on 

 Worms and Arthropods" pubHshed in 1871, a work which 

 received the prize of the St, Petersburg Academy and which con- 

 tained besides other interesting observations, the celebrated 

 description of the development of Sagitta ; and some of his later 

 publications on the physiology of excretory and circulatory organs 

 in invertebrates. 



Ilya Ilyitch Metchnikoff was born in 1845 ^"^1 studied at Khar- 

 kov. From 1864 to 1867 he worked in Germany at various uni- 

 versities. His first important publications published in 1866 deal 

 with the development of insects. His work in zoology extends 

 over about twenty years before he changed from zoology to bac- 

 teriology and immunity. His influence on the development of 

 our knowledge of invertebrate embryology was no less than that 

 of Kowalewsky and his researches also cover almost all groups of 

 invertebrates. He was the first to give a careful description of 

 the development of Hydrozoa and proposed the term of Paren- 

 chymula for their early larvae. He described parthenogenesis or 

 as he terms it "Sporogony" in Cunoctanta. He gave the first, 

 remarkable description of the embryology of the scorpion. He 

 described the six-legged larva of the Diplopoda. In his "Embry- 

 ological Studies of Insects," published in 1866, he described the 

 early separation of the progenital cells which he termed the 

 "polecells" in parthenogenetic Diptera. It was while working on 

 the development of invertebrates that Metchnikoff discovered 

 phagocytosis in 1882, the discovery which proved of such vital 

 importance in the study of disease and immunity and which 

 gradually diverted his attention from purely zoological subjects. 

 But T\Ietchnikoff worked also in anthropology and published in 

 1874 and in 1876 investigations of the Kalmyks. He was also a 

 populariser of biology and wrote numerous articles published 

 in the Russian magazines : "Naturalist," "Vestnik Evropy," 

 "Nature." "Plome and School." 



The brilliant young zoologist Alexander Pavlovitch Fedchenko, 

 who perished at the age of 29 in a snowstorm on Mont Blanc in 

 1873. has left a few remarkable investigations, as for example, 

 the description of the life history, hitherto unknown, of the 

 Guinea worm, Dracunculus medinensis. He brought from 

 Turkestan a rich collection of animals and plants, the description 



