Metchnikoff was one of the four representatives selected by the University to deliver orations in the Senate House in honour of Darwin. He especially drew attention to the influence of Darwin’s theory on the study of disease. The recognition of the derivation of man from animal ancestors, and of the complete community of the structure and the chemical activity of the organs of man with those of the organs of animals, had made (he said) the study of the diseases of animals a necessary feature in the understanding of the diseases of man. The far-reaching principle of Darwin that the mechanisms and processes observed in the bodies of plants and of animals (including man) must have been selected in the struggle for existence and perpetuated, because of their utility, led Metchnikoff to inquire what is the value or use of the process called inflammation and of the “eating corpuscles,” or “phagocytes” (so named by him), which wander from the blood into inflamed tissues. This question had led him to the discovery that the phagocytes engulf and destroy disease-germs, and are the great protectors of the animal and human body against bacteria and other germs which enter cut and wounded surfaces, and would start disease were there not “inflammation,” which is nothing more nor less than a nerve-regulated stagnation of the circulation of the blood at the wounded spot, and the consequent arrival at this spot of thousands of “phagocytes,” which pass out of the stagnant blood through the walls of the fine blood-vessels. These armies of phagocytes proceed to eat up and destroy all the germs which fall on to the wound—from the air, from dirty surfaces, and from the skin. The utility of inflammation and its gradual development, according to Darwinian principles, in the animal series, was shown twenty years ago by Metchnikoff. His important work on “immunity” and on infection and on protection against germ-caused disease is thus seen to be one of the many flourishing and valuable branches of knowledge which have originated from Darwin’s great conception and his example in experiment and inquiry.