LOUIS PASTEUR 315 



four weeks, repeating three or four times each the vaccinal inocula- 

 tions made with the bulbs of rabbits derived in succession from one 

 another and from the first one of the series, itself coming directly 

 from the monkey. I abstain from giving more details, because cer- 

 tain experiments which are actually going on allow me to expect 

 that the process will be greatly simplified. 



You must be feeling, gentlemen, that there is a great blank in my 

 communication ; I do not speak of the micro-organism of rabies. We 

 have not got it. The process for isolating it is still imperfect, and the 

 difficulties of its cultivation outside the bodies of animals have not yet 

 been got rid of, even by the use, as pabulum, of fresh nervous matter. 

 The methods which we employed in our study of rabies ought all 

 the more perhaps, on that account, to fix attention. Long still will 

 the art of preventing diseases have to grapple with virulent maladies 

 the micro-organic germs of which will escape our investigations. It 

 is, therefore, a capital scientific fact that we should be able, after all, 

 to discover the vaccination process for a virulent disease without yet 

 having at our disposal its special virus and whilst yet ignorant of how 

 to isolate or to cultivate its microbe. 



As soon as the method for the vaccination of dogs was firmly es- 

 tablished, and we had in our possession a large number of dogs which 

 had been rendered refractory to rabies, I had the idea of submitting 

 to a competent committee those of the facts which appeared destined 

 in future to serve as a basis for the vaccination of dogs against rabies. 

 That course was suggested to me in prevision of the later practical 

 application of the method, by the recollection of the opposition with 

 which Jenner's discovery met at its beginning. 



I spoke of my project to M. Fallieres, the Minister of Public 

 Instruction, who was pleased to approve of it and gave commission to 

 the following gentlemen to control the facts which I had summarily 

 communicated to the Academy of Sciences in its sitting of May 19 

 last: Messrs. Beclard, Paul Bert, Bouley, Aimeraud, Villemin, Vul- 

 pian. M. Bouley was appointed president. Dr. Villemin, secretary, 

 and the commission at once set to work. I have the pleasure of in- 

 forming you that it has just sent in a first report to the Minister. 

 I was acquainted with it here, and the following are in a few words, 

 the facts related in that first report on rabies. I had given to the 

 commission nineteen vaccinated dogs in succession — that is to say. 



