THE NATURE OF MAN STUDIES IN OPTIMISTIC PHILOSOPHY BY mechnibor ÉLIE METCHNIKOFF PROFESSOR AT THE PASTEUR INSTITUTE THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION EDITED BY P. CHALMERS MITCHELL M.A., D.Sc. Oxon. SECRETARY OF THE ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION WHEN Pasteur died a remarkable article appeared in one of the Paris newspapers. The writer described the intimate routine of the life at the Pasteur Institute, and compared it with that of a mediæval religious community. A little body of men, forsaking the world and the things of the world, had gathered together under the compulsion of a great idea. They had given up the rivalries and personal interests of ordinary men, and, sharing their goods and their work, they lived in austere devotion to science, finding no sacrifice of health or money, or of what men call pleasure, too great for the common object. Rumours of war and peace, echoes of the turmoil of politics and religion, passed unheeded over their monastic seclusion; but if there came news of a strange disease in China or Peru, a scientific emissary was ready with his microscope and his tubes to serve as a missionary of the new knowledge and the new hope that Pasteur had brought to suffering humanity. The adventurous exploits and the patient vigils of this new Order have brought about a revolution in our knowledge of disease, and there seems no limit to the triumphs that will come from the parent Institute in Paris and from its many daughters in other cities. Elie Metchnikoff, now Professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, is one of the most distinguished of the disciples who left all else to follow Pasteur. He was born on the third (16) May, 1845, in a village of the Government of iii 160978 iv EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION Kharkoff (Little Russia). He was educated at the Gymnasium and the University of Kharkoff, passing through the Faculty of Science. From 1864 to 1870 he worked at Zoology at Giessen, Göttingen and Munich, successively under three well-known zoologists, Leuckhart, Henle and Von Siebold, and was then appointed Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at Odessa. He made expedi tions to Madeira, Teneriffe and the Kalmuck Steppes in connection with his zoological researches. In 1882, in consequence of administrative difficulties, arising as part of the troubles that followed the murder of the Tzar, Alexander II., he resigned the Professorship and became Director of the municipal Bacteriological Laboratory. In 1888 he went to the Pasteur Institute, and has remained there since that time. The earlier part of Metchnikoff's career was devoted to Zoology, and chiefly to investigation of the embryological history of the lower invertebrates, and the sequence of his discoveries should afford food for reflection to those Baconian economists who are unwilling to shelter any tree of knowledge that does not give immediate promise of marketable fruit. The labour of many years spent in minute tracing of the development of insects, echinoderms, worms and jellyfish, would appear sufficiently unprofitable to those who give a scanty support to Botany as the provider of drugs, who tolerate Chemistry because it has supplied aniline dyes, and who patronise the physical sciences from a lively sense of the convenience of telephones and telegraphs. And yet from these remote, inhuman interests, Metchnikoff, without intellectual transition, passed directly to results affecting vitally the human race, and became one of the high priests of Bacteriology and a guardian of the Pandora's box of modern times. From observations made originally on water-fleas, he was led to discover the functions of the white corpuscles of human blood. He showed by what mechanism these made perpetual war against the intruding microbes of disease, and he laid the foundations of knowledge as to the agencies that weaken and the modes of strengthening these guardians of our health. In a series of investigations into the phenomena of inflammation in men and lower animals, he carried his observations into new fields, and explained the relations of the white corpuscles to the juices that attract and repel them (chemotaxis). It was he, for instance, who discovered that these corpuscles, under certain circumstances, migrate into the hairs and absorb and remove the pigment, so producing the blanching of old age. Although popularly the most interesting this was far from being the most important of the changes of senile decay that he found to be due to the activity of the wandering cells of the body. And, as will be seen in the present volume, the actions and interactions of the bacteria harboured in the body, the white corpuscles that are a natural part of the body, and the various juices or serums produced naturally or introduced by accident or design, are concerned in life itself and the decay of life. Metchnikoff is an expert of experts in the science of life, and has gained the right to a hearing by forty years of patient devotion and brilliant research. In the volume that he has now given to the public, he has addressed himself to the gravest and the most serious problems of humanity, to life and sex and death and the fear of death. From the earliest days when man could spare time from the satisfaction of his immediate wants to reflect upon his nature and destiny, these problems and the invention of fantastic solutions or evasive anodynes have absorbed his attention. folklore and philosophy, the religion and poetry of all races The |