Iviii 



Obituary Notices of Fellows deceased. 



" sour milk," from the sale of which he scrupulously abstained from deriving 

 any pecuniary profit. This small, though valuable, adventure of his in 

 dietetics has been — unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably — the one and only 

 feature of his long career of vast scientific discovery which has impressed 

 itself on the somewhat erratic intelligence of the " man in the street." 



In this connection, Metchnikoff made many investigations as to the 

 presence of various kinds of bacteria in the intestines of both vertebrate 

 and invertebrate animals, and the importance of those parasites in the 

 digestive process. Investigations were carried on in his laboratory as to the 

 possibility of keeping the digestive canal of new-born animals (tadpoles, 

 chicks, rabbits, and insect larvae) free from bacteria and the result upon the 

 digestive process. He found that the digestive canal of the large frugivorous 

 bats was very nearly free from bacterial infection, and he spent some time 

 himself, and employed one of his assistants, in studying in London the 

 condition, in regard to this matter, of patients from whom Mr. Arbuthnot 

 Lane had removed the large intestine. His work on this subject was still in 

 progress. 



Another piece of work of immense importance to the health of the com- 

 munity, which we owe entirely to Metchnikoff, is the demonstration, carried 

 out. in the first place, by experiments in his laboratory on Chimpanzees, and 

 later confirmed by the voluntary submission to experiment on the part of a 

 young French medical man, that the application of calomel ointment is a 

 definite preventive of the transference of the syphilitic virus from one indi- 

 vidual to another. This discovery has been made widely known, and has 

 been officially and systematically applied by the public medical authorities 

 in France, Germany, Austria, and other countries, with the most satisfactory 

 results. Metchnikoff himself anticipated that, in a few years' time, the 

 knowledge of this simple preventive would entirely extirpate the terrible 

 disease in those countries sufficiently civilised to make use of it. 



Metchnikoff was a Foreign Member and Copley Medallist of the Eoyal 

 Society, a Member of the Institute of France, of the Academy of Sciences of 

 Petrograd, and of many other societies. In 1908 he was awarded the Nobel 

 Prize for his researches on immunity, and he received only a fortnight before 

 his death the announcement that the Albert Medal of the Society of Arts of 

 London had been awarded to him in view of the benefit to humanity of his 

 scientific discoveries. 



I cannot close this imperfect survey of the impressive and ideally complete 

 career of my friend without some few personal notes. From the day when 

 I met him in Pasteur's laboratory in 1888 we became warm friends. He 

 was singularly simple, genuine, and unaffectedly good and unselfish. I could 

 tell a hundred tales of his benevolence and humane spirit ; of the unrecorded 

 charitable aid given by him and his wife to the poor of Paris and to 

 expatriated Eussians ; of his genuine kindness and consideration for all those 

 who were his servants. I am convinced that the devotion of the latter half 

 of his life to the solution of the problems of disease was due to his goodness 



