The Romantic Rationalist: a Study of Elie Metchnikoff.

TOWARDS the end of his life the tall, gaunt, stooping figure of Elie Metchnikoff (the French form of his name which he used for the last twenty-five years of his life) with long unkempt hair and flowing beard was almost a caricature of the Russian Bolshevik emigre'. He might have stepped from the pages ofa Dostoyevsky novel. His personality too seems to have combined the Rational and Romantic elements in a characteristically Russian manner. Elie Metchnikoff was born on i6 May I845, the fifth and last child in the family of a middle-aged, rather dissipated semi-retired army officer and an intelligent and beautiful woman ofJewish descent. The family name, Metchnikoff, was supposed to have been derived from a famous paternal ancestor, a Moldavian who was tutor to Peter the Great and Russian Ambassador to the Chinese Court in the seventeenth century. The ancestor's name was Nicholas Spatar Milescu, and Spatar, apparently meaning sword-bearer, was translated into the Russian word, Metchnikoff, by a nephew of Milescu. The young Metchnikoff was a sensitive and emotionally labile child whose only strong attachment was to his mother. The strength of the bond between Elie and his mother is attested by the fact that he consulted her, until the time of her death, on every conceivable aspect of his life. It is tempting to attribute to this relationship Elie's manifest difficulties in adjusting to life as an adult man and his two extraordinary marriages. The early years of Elie's life were spent in the feudal family estate in what is now the Eastern Ukraine. Left to himself in the midst of the overpowering steppe in which man took his place as a member of a closely integrated biological community and not as a manipulator of nature, Elie's interest turned early to natural history. At the age of six he used his pocket-money to bribe anyone he could find to listen to his lectures on the local flora and fauna. When he was eight years old Elie came under the influence of a natural science student employed to teach his older brother Leo. Under the tutor's guidance Elie read voraciously in botany and zoology for three years and spent many hours collecting specimens of local plants and animals. In I856 he left home and entered the lyce'e at Kharkoff. Here for the first time he encountered socialism, materialism and atheism. He clutched at the last like the proverbial drowning man at the straw. Another concept which made a big impression on him at this time was that the progress of civilization depended on the advancement of science. This notion became almost an idee fixe for him in later life. It was at Kharkoff, when he was fifteen years old, that Elie Metchnikoff first came across the world of microscopical biology. He was fascinated, and although Kharkoff University refused him access to a laboratorv he borrowed a micro-