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.
Élie 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 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 expeditions 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. The folklore and philosophy, the religion and poetry of all races and of all stages of culture, from savage barbarism to decadent refinement, revolve round these obsessions of the mind, and, as Metchnikoff most plainly shows, no enduring comfort has yet been found. Now for the first time in the history of thought, the exact methods of science have been brought to the statement of the problems.
In revising this translation of Metchnikoff’s book for the English-speaking public I have had to content myself with seeing that the plain meaning of the French was transformed to plain English, and that references to French editions were changed, so far as was possible, to corresponding references to English editions. Some of the phrases that recur were difficult to express. “Human nature” for instance is not an exact equivalent of la nature humaine, for the latter phrase has a complete significance, and very definitely implies not only the mental qualities of man, but his bodily framework, with its inherited and acquired anatomical structure and physiological functions. The phrase “human constitution,” especially in the common medical sense, carries more of the meaning, and I have used it occasionally. The word “harmony” means harmony with the environment, and disharmony is want of harmony or imperfect adaptation to the existing environment. In the case of the human organism, which has passed through profound changes at a rate prodigious in the history of evolution, many parts of the constitution are no longer in gear with the existing environment, and it is in such disharmonies that Metchnikoff finds the source of the troubles that have perplexed mankind.
In several parts of this volume, and particularly in the chapter dealing with disharmonies in the reproductive functions, there is much plain speaking on matters that modern civilisation attempts to conceal. I have not had the impertinence to suppress or to alter a line or a word of these pages. They are written in high seriousness on fundamental facts of the constitution of man; they relate to problems and difficulties that every age in the history of man has had to face, and that are dealt with in the plainest language in the books of all the religions. For the first time proper knowledge has been brought to the task, and it is to be remembered that this volume is an attempt to explain mysteries of the flesh and of the spirit of which all existing explanations have failed to satisfy humanity. The volume is avowedly no more than a preliminary statement, a rallying-point for the work of future generations. But it awakens a new hope for humanity now that the old are fallen dumb; as Metchnikoff himself says, “If it be true that man cannot live without faith, this volume, when the age of faith seemed gone by, has provided a new faith, that in the all-powerfulness of science.” In every country, the new Order of priests of science, in the vigils of the laboratory, is working for the future of humanity.