Spatar's literary activity was vast and varied. He translated the Bible from the Greek into Roumanian; he wrote a chronicle on the origin of Roumania, articles on theology, a Greco-Latin-Russian dictionary, and a work entitled _Arithmetic_, in which he discussed, by means of numbers and figures, questions of Theology, Philosophy, and Ethics. He dealt in his writings with Art, Archæology, and History; described his Siberian travels, China and the Amour river, and made numerous translations of diplomatic documents. His erudition was such that his contemporaries appealed to his knowledge as they would have consulted an encyclopædia. He had married a Muscovite and had several sons and grandsons. Three of his nephews came from Moldavia to join him and entered the Russian army. He died in 1714 at the age of 80. Such is the history of the "Great Spatar." The following notice is to be found in Brockhaus and Effrone's _Encyclopædia_: "The Metchnikoffs are a noble family, descended from a Moldavian Boyar, the Spatar (sword-bearer) Joury Stepanovitch,[6] who came to Russia with Prince Cantemir. Peter the Great gave this Boyar large land estates. His son took the name of Metchnikoff (Russian translation of Sword-bearer)." [6] This Boyar was no doubt a nephew of the Great Spatar. The following generations included military men chiefly, one sailor, one mining engineer, one senator, but no scientific men. On the mother's side, Elie Metchnikoff had no ancestor as remarkable or as romantic as the great Spatar. Yet his grandfather, Leo Nevahovitch, was a very intelligent and highly cultivated man. He had been Farmer-General for tobacco in Poland. A Jew by race, he took to heart the persecutions directed against his co-religionists and defended them in literary newspaper articles. Nevertheless he accepted indirect advice from Alexander I. and let himself be baptized. He adopted the Lutheran religion and his children were brought up in it. At the beginning of the Polish Revolution in 1830, Nevahovitch was warned that his house was about to be sacked; the warning reached him as he was peacefully enjoying a theatrical performance. He hurried to prepare for departure and left Warsaw with his family for Petersburg, where he lived on his income. Having given up business, he took up literary work and translated German philosophical works, made friends in the literary world, and knew Pushkin and Kriloff. His children, Emilia Lvovna amongst others, inherited his intellectual gifts. One of his sons was a remarkable caricaturist and edited a caricature newspaper which was very well known at the time. The Nevahovitch family produced no men of science. Metchnikoff himself considered that he had inherited his mother's disposition and turn of mind. In any case, his ancestors on both sides included talented individuals, from whom he may have inherited his gifts and his innate taste for science. CHAPTER VII