nks sweep forward without an
instant's hesitation, and pour on in a living torrent, like the Zulu
_impis_ at Rorke's Drift, until the bacilli are battered down by the
sheer impact of the bodies of their assailants, or smothered under the
pile of their corpses. When this has happened, in the language of the
old surgeon-philosophers, "suppuration is established," and the patient
is saved.

Or if, as often happens, an antitoxin is formed, which protects the
whole body, this is largely built out of substances set free from the
bodies of slain leucocytes. And the only thing that dims our vision to
the wonder and beauty of this drama, is that it happens every day, and
we term it prosaically "the process of repair," and expect it as a
matter of course. Every wound-healing is worthy of an epic, if we could
only look at it from the point of view of these citizens of our great
cell-republic. And if we were to ask the question, "Upon what does
their peculiar value to the body-politic depend?" we should find that it
was largely the extent to which they retained their ancestral
characteristics. They are born in the lymph-nodes, which are simply
little islands of tissue of embryonic type, preserved in the body
largely for the purpose of breeding this primitive type of cells. They
are literally the Indian police, the scavengers, the Hibernians, as it
were, of the entire body. They have the roving habits and fighting
instincts of the savage. They cruise about continually through the
waterways and marshes of the body, looking for trouble, and, like their
Hibernian descendants, wherever they see a head they hit it. They are
the incarnation of the fighting spirit of our ancestors, and if it were
not for their retention of this characteristic in so high a degree, many
classes of our fixed cells would not have been able to subside into such
burgher like habits.

Although even here, as we shall see, it is only a question of quickness
of response, for while the first bands of the enemy may be held at bay
by the leucocyte cavalry, and a light attack repelled by their
skirmish-line, yet when it comes to the heavy fighting of a
fever-invasion, it is the slow but substantial burgher-like fixed cells
of the body which form the real infantry masses of the campaign. And I
believe that upon the proportional relation between these primitive and
civilized cells of our body-politic will depend many of the singular
differences, not only in degree but a