Lev Mechnikov

Lev Ilyich Mechnikov (1838 to 1888), also written Léon Metchnikoff, was a Russian and Swiss geographer, sociologist and anarchist theorist. Born in Saint Petersburg, he studied several subjects at Russian universities, fought under Garibaldi in Italy in 1860, and from 1864 lived in Switzerland, apart from two years as a teacher in Japan from 1874. He collaborated with Élisée Reclus on the Nouvelle Géographie universelle, and from 1883 he taught statistics and comparative geography at the University of Neuchâtel. His 1886 article Revolution and Evolution argued that sociocultural evolution tends from despotism to anarchy, and his posthumous book Civilization and the Great Historical Rivers described how civilisations grew from river civilisations to mediterranean and then oceanic ones.