LIFE OF ELIE METCHNIKOFF 103 



all such theses should be refused, and the Faculty 

 approved. This was the signal for a storm in the 

 University, the Dean was hooted by the students, and 

 many of them were threatened with being expelled. 

 The Curator desired the more influential professors, 

 of whom Metchnikoff was one, to intervene with the 

 students in order to bring disorder to an end, and the 

 professors consented, on condition that the offending 

 Dean should resign. The Curator promised that 

 he should be asked to do so, and order was imme- 

 diately restored ; but the Dean remained and many 

 students were severely and unjustly punished. Metch- 

 nikoff thereupon produced his resignation, which was 

 promptly accepted, and thus his University career 

 came to an end. 



Besides his University lectures, he gave public 

 lectures on Natural History which were attended by 

 a number of female students, for women at that time 

 were only admitted to the Faculty of Medicine, and 

 these lectures were extremely useful to them. Metch- 

 nikoff, though he did not believe that women could 

 accomplish creative work in science, was strongly 

 in favour of higher education for women, considering 

 it as necessary to their general intellectual develop- 

 ment. Genius, he thought, was peculiar to the male 

 sex, no woman having created anything " of genius " 

 even in domains which had always been accessible to 

 them, such as music, literature, and the applied arts. 

 The very rare exceptions, to his mind, only proved 

 the rule ; yet he did not draw the conclusion that 

 woman was in any sense inferior to man. He merely 

 held that her gifts are different from those of men. 



Metchnikoff's health had been seriously shaken 



