224 THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



lent of his salary as Professor of Chemistry at the 

 Sorbonne. (He had received appointment in 1867, 

 but had been compelled by ill-health to relinquish 

 his academic functions.) The grant was in all re- 

 spects wise. Huxley remarked that Pasteur's discov- 

 eries alone would suffice to cover the war indemnity 

 of five milliards paid by France to Germany in 1871. 

 Moreover, all his activities were dictated by patriotic 

 motives. He felt that science is of no country and 

 that its conquests belong to mankind, but that the 

 scientist must be a patriot in the service of his native 

 land. 



Pasteur now applied his energies to the study of 

 virulent diseases, following the principles of his ear- 

 lier investigations. He opposed those physicians who 

 believed in the spontaneity of disease, and he wished 

 to wage a war of extermination against all injurious 

 organisms. As early as 1850 Davaine and Rayer had 

 shown that a rod-like micro-organism was always pres- 

 ent in the blood of animals dying of anthrax, a dis- 

 ease which was destroying the flocks and herds of 

 France. Dr. Koch, who had served in the Franco- 

 Prussian War, succeeded in 1876 in obtaining pure 

 cultures of this bacillus and in defining its relation 

 to the disease. Pasteur took up the study of anthrax 

 in 1877, verified previous discoveries, and, as we shall 

 see, sought means for the prevention of this pest. 

 He discovered (with Joubert and Chamberland) the 

 bacillus of malignant edema. He applied the prin- 

 ciples of bacteriology to the treatment of puerperal 

 fever, which in 1864 had rendered fatal 310 cases 

 out of 1350 confinements in the Maternite in Paris. 

 Here he had to fight against conservatism in the 



