256 SUSCEPTIBILITY AND IMMUNITY. 



hardly a single white corpuscle in the interior of which bacilli can- 

 not be seen. Many corpuscles contain isolated bacilli only ; others 

 have thick masses in their interior, the nucleus being still recog- 

 nizable ; while in others the nucleus can be no longer distinguished ; 

 and, finally, the corpuscle may become a cluster of bacilli, breaking 

 up at the margin the origin of which one could not have explained 

 had there been no opportunity of seeing all the intermediate steps 

 between the intact white corpuscle and these masses " (Fig. 78). It 

 will be noted that in the above, quotation Koch affirms that the 

 bacilli penetrate the leucocytes and multiply in their interior. Now, 

 the theory of phagocytosis assumes that the bacilli are picked up by 

 the leucocytes and destroyed in their interior, and that immunity de- 

 pends largely upon the power of these " phagocytes" to capture and 

 destroy living pathogenic bacilli. 



The writer suggested this as an hypothesis as long ago as 1881, 

 in a paper read before the American Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science, in the following language: 



"It has occurred to me that possibly the white corpuscles may 

 have the office of picking up and digesting bacterial organisms which 



FIG. 78. Bacillus of mouse septicaemia in leucocytes from blood of mouse (Koch). 



by any n^eans find their way into the blood. The propensity exhib- 

 ited by the leucocytes for picking up inorganic granules is well 

 known, and that they may be able not only to pick up but to assimi- 

 late, and so dispose of, the bacteria which come in their way, does 

 not seem to me very improbable, in view of the fact that amoebae, 

 which resemble them so closely, feed upon bacteria and similar or- 

 ganisms." ' 



At a later date (1884) Metschnikoff offered experimental evi- 

 dence in favor of this view, and the explanation suggested in the 

 above quotation is commonly spoken of as the Metschnikoff theory. 



1 " A Contribution to the Study of Bacterial Organisms commonly found upon 

 Exposed Mucous Surfaces and in the Alimentary Canal of Healthy Individuals." Il- 

 lustrated by photomicrographs. Proceedings of the American Association for Ad- 

 vancement of Science, 1881, Salem, 1882, xxx., 83-94. Also in Studies from the 

 Biological Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, vol. ii., No. 2, 1882. 



