18 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



repeated. Later this lot, and also twenty-five untreated sheep and four 

 untreated cows, were to be inoculated with a virulent culture of an- 

 thrax bacilli. Ten sheep were to have no treatment at all. "The 

 twenty-five unvaccinated sheep will all perish/' wrote Pasteur, " the 

 twenty-five vaccinated ones will survive." This magnificent faith based 

 on exact experimentation was justified. All happened as Pasteur pre- 

 dicted. For medicine a new era was at hand; Huxley, in 1880, esti- 

 mated that the money value of the results of Pasteur's vaccination 

 treatment was sufficient to cover the war indemnity paid by France to 

 Germany in 1879. As the years go by and the influence of Pasteur 

 widens the horizon of preventive medicine and the treatment of disease 

 by immunizing methods, civilization's indebtedness to Pasteur is almost 

 beyond the grasp of the imagination. 



His discoveries in vaccination against swine erysipelas and hydro- 

 phobia are as fascinating, in their " mingling of experimental skill and 

 scientific imagination" (Herter), as all that he did before. But while 

 Pasteur is an engaging figure, worthy of much more than this simple 

 lecture that we are devoting to him, yet he is not the whole story, and at 

 this point we must turn away from him and proceed to another line of 

 advance: one, however, which was in part the result of his genius and 

 his indefatigable labor. This, the discovery of antitoxic sera, will be 

 discussed in the next lecture, in connection with other modern prob- 

 lems and methods in medical research. But here let me remind you 

 that it was Pasteur, afflicted at the age of 46 with a hemiplegic paraly- 

 sis — which, by the way, left its traces during the remaining twenty-five 

 years of his life — who said, 



Work can be made into a pleasure, and alone is profitable to a man, to his 

 country, to the world. 



It would be difficult to find in any field of human endeavor an in- 

 dividual whose life and labors exemplified this precept better than do 

 the life and labors of Louis Pasteur. 



