He has rather a short figure and a large head, with a bushy gray beard, but hair that is still dark. His spectacles are not sufficient to impart severity to his mild blue eyes. His voice is low and pleasant, and he speaks, as he moves, without either hurry or hesitation. He is a worker among workers, inspiring with his indefatigable zeal the young men who come to him from Europe, America, and Asia to pursue their researches in bacteriology.
A walk through the Pasteur Institute is like a visit to a zoölogical garden, for the study of each particular human disease requires the discovery of some species that is also susceptible to it. Here are not only the dogs, guinea pigs, and rats common to every bacteriological laboratory, but also many others closely connected with Metchnikoff's special interests; parrots and geese, for example, which are remarkable for their longevity; bats, which eat rotten food and yet maintain an aseptic intestinal tract; and chimpanzees, which, as the literal blood relations of man, are capable of sharing the worst of his diseases.
Like Agassiz, Metchnikoff has "no time to get rich." At his home in the suburbs of Paris he sets an example of the plain living he advocates, supplementing the meager salary given him at the Institute by the income of a small estate in Russia. The twenty thousand dollars he received from the Nobel Foundation he devoted entirely to the furtherance of his researches in longevity.
M. Metchnikoff has given the best possible proof that he has no personal aversion to women who enter his profession, for he married in 1875 as his second wife a Russian bacteriologist of distinction. He dedicated to her his first volume of "Optimistic Studies," and in it he cites her experiments on the growth of microbe-free tadpoles. She is an artist as well as a scientist, and here, too, M. Metchnikoff shares her tastes, for he is fond of painting and music. They have no children, but he has a godchild to whom he is devoted.
His high regard for individuality leads him to look with favor upon the entrance of women into the universities and the professions. He has no fear that it will result in the production of a class of celibates corresponding to the sexless workers of the beehive. On the contrary, his observation of the feminist movement for more than forty years has shown him that learned ladies are by no means wanting in the marital and maternal instincts common and proper to their sex. Of a thousand women in the St. Petersburg Medical School, ten per cent had been married before, and forty-four per cent were married during their course of study. A conspicuous case of feminine scientific genius is that of Sonya Kovalevsky, who attained the highest eminence in that field which, by the common consent of men, was formerly regarded as unattainable by women; that is, pure mathematics. But the day when she received the doubled prize of the French Academy of Sciences she wrote to a friend that she had never felt so unhappy, and the cause of her unhappiness, as revealed in her letters and romances, was that she was not beloved as other women were.
Although Metchnikoff would grant to women every opportunity for the exercise of their talents, and thinks they had better occupy themselves with science than with fashions, he believes genius of a high order to be much rarer among them than among men. When he was called upon by the women doctors and scientists at the Naturalists' Congress at St. Petersburg for his opinion of the feminist movement, he created considerable consternation among them by the following frank language:
Your complaint, as I understand it, is that man has excluded woman from all higher intellectual occupation by unnatural means, so that her mind has become atrophied, her capabilities blunted, her talents stagnant. You would remedy all this by being made man's equal in politics. You would then, you say, develop your slumbering abilities, overtake, and possibly surpass, your immemorial enslaver—man.
But do you really need this political equality in order to attain this supremacy? Has the down-trodden among men ever needed it? His political equality has come as an effect not as the cause of his intellectual development. The mind that dominates in the artistic and scientific world ultimately arrives at political supremacy.
But what art or science has man closed to you? You are here; but really, ladies, I have failed to discover a Bichat, a Louis, a Jenner, or a Pasteur among you. Have you personally been impeded in your careers more than certain individuals among men? Now let us take the arts. Is there a man-master so unnatural who ever forbade his female slave to express herself in music? But where are your Beethovens, your Wagners, your Verdis, your Brahms? I beg of you, dear ladies, if you remember one, tell me.
What brutal slave owner at any time forbade women to beautify canvas with satisfying hues and lines depicting life or nature? As in music, man has encouraged women to do these things, yet where are your Raphaels, your Leonardos, your Rubenses? Have women been forbidden to mold, carve, or draw? Yet where is your Phidias, your Michelangelo, your Cellini? Did you ever hear of a woman architect?
Home and motherhood there, of course, the most radical among you will not say that man has attempted to restrain you—there you have had from time immemorial, in all ages, in all places, under every condition, absolute and full freedom. Still, is it not man, the enslaver, who teaches you domestic economy? Is it not from man that you have learned how to care for your offspring in illness, how to amuse them in health? Who discovered the laws of domestic hygiene? Was it a woman?
Now, my dear ladies, has man ever excluded you from the kitchen? No, you say, you have been enslaved there. "Cook! Feed the brute!" is eternally dinned in your ears. It would seem reasonable that at least in this sphere woman should have reached a high standard of perfection. And the actual result? Ah, dear ladies, I must confess. If I want a really good dinner I must have recourse to a chef.
And now, ladies, I ask your pardon, you have all studied physiology and psychology, and you know where such considerations would lead me. But one word more: Do not lose sight of the significance of your request, "Professor, what is your opinion of the feministic movement?" for that makes out your case perfectly—to advocate your cause you would call in the help of man.
Metchnikoff has very little liking for the political methods in vogue in our republics. He thinks young men too reckless, opinionated, and pessimistic to be intrusted with the ballot at the age of twenty-one. "It is easily intelligible," he says, "that in the new conditions such modern idols as universal suffrage, public opinion, and the referendum, in which the ignorant masses are called upon to decide questions which demand varied and profound knowledge, will last no longer than the old idols. The progress of human knowledge will bring about the replacement of such institutions by others in which applied morality will be controlled by really competent persons." But he fails to inform us how these "competent persons" are to be selected and placed in power.
To give an account of the varied researches which Metchnikoff has carried on or has superintended at the Pasteur Institute is apart from our purpose and would in any case be impossible here, because it would involve the recapitulation of a great part of the history of medical progress for the past quarter century. During this period the science of medicine has been completely revolutionized, for the use of traditional and empirical remedies has been largely replaced by a systematic search for the causes of diseases and the experimental determination of methods of avoiding or counteracting them. In general, the change may be characterized as a return to nature. In the older medicine at its best, a dose of some vegetable or mineral substance, such as quinine or mercury, comparatively harmless, but altogether foreign to the body, was administered through the mouth and in time reaching the blood through the digestive systems, killed off or paralyzed the disease germ. In modern medicine at its best, some substance, such as the diphtheria antitoxin, that is already present in the blood in quantity sufficient under ordinary circumstances to prevent infection, is reënforced in an emergency by more of the same substance prepared in the blood of the horse. Or if that cannot be done, the next best thing is to inject some serum that by a natural reaction will stimulate the body to prepare in excess its own antitoxin or excite the phagocytes to greater exertions in overcoming their enemies. In any case, the object is to induce an artificial immunity as nearly as possible like the natural immunity of the healthy body.
Phagocytes—that is, "devouring cells"—was the name given by Metchnikoff to the leucocytes or white cells, which he found wandering about the body in search of their prey. They lead a sort of semi-independent life, like the simplest one-celled animal, the amoeba, and they penetrate to all parts of the body, even squeezing in between the toughened tissue of the skin and bones. When a cut is made in the skin they are borne to the breach by the flow of blood and there pile up and coagulate, forming a new skin to protect the raw flesh, somewhat as a breach in a rampart is hastily filled in with sand bags. Not only that, but when the enemy actually gains entrance either by storming a wound or sneaking in through some unguarded opening, then the white cells rally to the attack, surrounding and destroying the invading microbes. If these multiply too rapidly, the phagocyte reserves are mobilized, new recruits by the million are called out, until the bodily force is victorious or exhausted. Such a battle we call a local inflammation, or, if the engagement is general and long continued, a fever. Under the microscope we may watch the foes engaged in single combat, the phagocyte devouring the bacillus, a living, formless mass of protoplasm stretching out extemporized tentacles and engulfing the rod, globe, or writhing spiral which we may afterward see slowly digesting in its interior.