Ivi Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



Pasteur in Paris, who, thoroughly appreciating the value of his work, gave 

 him a laboratory and every facility for his investigations in his own institute, 

 at that time located in the Ecole Norrnale, rue Vaugirard. When, a few 

 years later, the Institut Pasteur was built in the rue Dutot, Metchnikoff was 

 given a fine suite of laboratories, lecture-room, and space for keeping animals, 

 and became sub-director of the Institute a few years ago. 



Young investigators now came in growing numbers to Paris in order to 

 work in Metchnikoff 's laboratory, and he pursued with triumphant success, 

 but not without opposition and sometimes insult from the older and more 

 ignorant medical men, the establishment of his views as to the essential 

 importance of " phagocytosis " in resistance to disease. Among his more 

 fatuous opponents was a prominent English pathologist who scornfully 

 alluded to his views as " Metchnikoffism." 



In 1892 he produced as an illustrated volume, with the title ' The Com- 

 parative Pathology of Inflammation,' the substance of a course of lectures 

 delivered at the Institut Pasteur. It is one of the most delightful examples 

 of scientific method conceivable. It is essentially a careful and logical 

 presentation of minute observations arranged so as to bring before the reader 

 the evidence in favour of his argument. He invariably followed this method 

 in the controversies in which he necessarily engaged. He never recrimi- 

 nated ; he never cited mere authority nor endeavoured to falsify his 

 opponent's statements by " smart " word-play. He simply made new experi- 

 ments and observations suggested by his adversary's line of attack, and so 

 practically smothered him by the weight of honest, straightforward demon- 

 stration of fact. He showed that in the lower animals the phagocytes are 

 attracted in hundreds by " chemiotaxis " to intrusive or injurious bodies 

 which occur in the tissues, and then either enclose or digest them. He 

 proceeded to show that in the vertebrates, where the immense network of 

 the blood-vessels is under the control of the nervous system, " inflammation '' 

 is set up as a curative process, and that the elaboration of its mechanism has 

 been established by natural selection. A local arrest of the blood-stream is 

 produced by the nerve-control of the vascular system, resulting in the out- 

 wandering from the now nearly stagnant blood of phagocytes chemically 

 attracted to an injured spot, where, arriving like an innumerable crowd or 

 army of scavengers, they proceed to engulf and digest tissue which has been 

 killed by injury, and similarly to isolate or to destroy and digest injurious 

 intrusive substances, prominent among which are infective poisonous bacteria. 



Metchnikoff thus finally and conclusively " explained " the process called 

 " inflammation." His attention, and that of his pupils, was now given for 

 some years to the great question of "immunity." How is it that some 

 individuals are either free from the attacks of parasitic micro-organisms to 

 which their fellows are liable, or, if attacked, suffer less seriously than others 

 do ? To answer this question is to go a long way to the solution of the great 

 practical question as to how to produce immunity to infective disease in 

 man. It involved the investigation of the chemical activities of the phago- 



