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Why should we trouble about vastness mere extension in space? There is a sense in which the infinitesimally small is more marvellous, more disquieting, than the infinitely great. The ant, the flea, nay, the phagocyte in our blood, is really a more startling phenomenon than all the mechanics and chemistry of the heavens.
Winona reasoned with him as she would have reasoned with certain high personages on the other side of the water, and perhaps with as little success. He replied cryptically that he was an out-and-out phagocyte, and getting more so every time he read a newspaper. Winona winced at the term it seemed to carry sinister implications. Where did the boy hear such words?
Science has named these defensive proteins ~alexins.~ It has also been found that the phagocyte and tissue cells in the neighborhood of the area of irritation produce antipoisons or natural antitoxins, which neutralize the bacterial poisons and kill the microorganisms of disease. With the Evil, Nature Provides the Cure
Sometimes, however, the invading microbes come in, not in companies but in platoons, innumerable as Xerxes' Persians, and then "e'en Roderick's best are backward borne," and we die. For our life is the prize of the combat in these novel lists which science has revealed to our view through the microscope, and health is but the token of the triumphant victory of the phagocyte over the microbe.
Of recent years nothing has so fascinated the imagination even of the least imaginative of men as the theory of disease which transforms every drop of blood in our bodies into the lists in which phagocyte and microbe wage the mortal strife on which our health depends.
If the defenders of the body, the phagocyte and antitoxins, produced in the tissues and organs, gain the victory over the inimical forces which are threatening the health and life of the organism, then the symptoms of inflammation, swelling, redness, heat, pain and the accelerated heart action which accompanies them, gradually subside.
Our properties and appetites are but the sum of those of the protoplasmic organisms the cells of which we are built up. Our need for a relish with oysters is the same thing as the need of the phagocyte for a relish with its microbes, not something "poetically" compared to it. The story of "the oysters and the carpenter" might be replaced by that of "the microbes and the phagocyte."
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