INFECTION AND IMMUNITY. 571 



little that is conclusive, except the fact that Metchnikoff 

 has repeatedly claimed that in all of these infections the 

 leucocytes are alone the cause of the complicated appear- 

 ances resulting from infection. Wolff 1 is inclined to 

 believe that the antibody formation occurs in all other 

 organs except the one in which the endotoxin exerts its 

 poisonous action, because Pfeiffer and Marx, and Wasser- 

 man in their work upon microspira comma and bacillus 

 typhosus have shown that the principal points of forma- 

 tion of the specific immune body are the haematopoietic 

 organs. Wolff is inclined to regard the principal point 

 of attack of the endotoxins of all pathogenic organisms 

 to be the central nervous system, and as the result of 

 certain experiments which he has made he believes that 

 the immune bodies are formed in the other organs. The 

 facts which have led him to this conclusion are the re- 

 sults obtained in intracerebral injections of certain poisons. 

 Such injections, of course, bring the poison in direct re- 

 lation with the point of selective action, and there is 

 little opportunity for the anchoring or destruction of the 

 poison by other tissue cells or body fluids. In injections 

 into other parts of the body, especially when endotoxins 

 or bacteria are employed, there is an opportunity for the 

 anchoring of these elements to the receptors of certain 

 cells and, in consequence, unless the amount of toxin is 

 very large, the formation of antibodies takes place. On 

 the basis of such experimental results it seems probable 

 that Wolff's conclusions are correct. 



THE DEFENCE OF THE BODY AGAINST INFEC- 

 TION. Briefly stated, the invasion of the body by infec- 

 tive micro-organisms may best be conceived as a contest 



1 Wolff: Centralblatt f. Bacteriologie, originate, 1904, Bd. 37, and 

 Berliner klin. Wochenschr., 1904. 



