492 THE LIFE-WORK OF A CHEMIST. 



foolish and sliortsighted to decry tlic, imrsnit of auy form of scientific 

 study because it may be as yet far removed from i>ractical application 

 to the wants of man, and although such studies may be of great value 

 as an incentive to intellectual activity, yet the statement is so evident 

 as to almost amount to a truism, that discoveries which give us the 

 power of rescuing a population from starvation, or which tend to 

 diminish the ills that flesh, whether of man or beast, is heir to, must 

 deservedly attract more attention and create a more general interest 

 than others having so far no direct bearing on the welfare of the race. 



"There is no greater charm,'' says Pasteur himself, "for the investi- 

 gator than to make new discoveries, but his pleasure is more than 

 doubled when he sees that they find direct application in practical life." 

 To make discoveries capable of such an application has been the good 

 fortune — by which I mean the just reward — of Pasteur. How he made 

 them is the lesson which I desire this evening to teach. I wish to show 

 that these discoveries, culminating as the latest and perhaps the most 

 remarkable of all, in that of a cure for the dreaded and most fearful of 

 all fearful maladies, hydrophobia, have not been, in the words of Priest- 

 ley, "lucky hap-hazardings," but the outcome of patient and long con- 

 tinned investigation. This latest result is, as I shall ])rove to you, not 

 an isolated case of a happy chance, but simply the last link in a long 

 chain of discoveries, each one of which has followed the other in logi- 

 cal sequence, each one bound to the other by ties which exhibit the life- 

 work of the discoverer as one consequent whole. In order however to 

 understand the end we must begin at the beginning, and ask ourselves 

 what was the nature of the training of band, eye, and brain, which en- 

 abled Pasteur to wrest from nature secret processes of disease the dis- 

 covery of which had hitherto bafded all the efforts of biologists 1 What 

 was the power by virtue of which he succeeded when all others had 

 failed ; how was he able to trace the causes and point out remedies for 

 the hitherto unaccountable changes and sicknesses which beer and wine 

 undergo? What means did he adopt to cure the fatal silk- worm dis- 

 ease, the existence of which in the south of France in one year cost that 

 country more than 100,000,000 of francs ? Or how did he arrive at a 

 method for exterminating a plague known as fowl cholera, or that of 

 the deadly cattle disease, anthrax, or splenic fever, which has killed 

 niillions of cattle, and is the fatal woolsorters' disease in manf And 

 last, but not least, how did he gain an insight into the workings of that 

 most mysterious of all poisons, the virus of hydroj^hobia ? 



To do more than point out the spirit which has guided Pasteur in all 

 his work, and to give an idea of the nature of that work in a few exam^- 

 ples, I can not attempt, in the time at my disi)osal. Of the magnitude 

 and far-reaching character of that work we may form a notion, when 

 we remember that it is to Pasteur that we owe the foundation of the 

 science of bacteriology, a science treating of the ways and means of 

 those minute organisms called microbes, upon whose behavior the very 



