CHAPTER V 



The Theory of Immunity 1 



WHEN the late Sir William Osier jested at the expense 

 of the new school of theorizing biologists who 

 strive to perpetuate in peculiar neologisms highly doubtful 

 microscopic observations, he drew a caricature of their 

 specialized language, which had considerable merit. But 

 while he fought against specialism run mad in verbal 

 constructions, which at once simulate knowledge and 

 obscure it, he might just as well have taken his examples 

 from the armoury of certain bacteriologists. If, in the 

 phenomena of mitosis, "the idiosphaerosome differentiates 

 into an idiocrytosome and an idiocalyptosome, both 

 surrounded by the idiosphaerotheca," such a passage is 

 assuredly not more curious to observe than many which 

 cram a hundred Greek and Latin derivatives and hybrids 

 into a bacteriological " explanation." Although any 

 science seems liable to fall into the practical fallacy of 

 thinking a thing can be explained without reference or 

 relation to others, bacteriology appears least immune to 

 this logical disorder of thought. But since explanation 

 consists in the classification of observations with regard 



1 (For abstract of this paper, and for Professor Benjamin Moore's 

 comments, see British Medical Journal, December 8, 1917. and December 

 22, 1917.) 



127 



