so Proccedlii.(j.'i of flic Royal Society of Victoria. 



There is another point that I will ask \^ou to bear in your 

 minds, as upon it hinges all the value of the experiments 

 held on sheep that we have received by a recent mail, and 

 which are to prove that they could not be attacked by the 

 disease. I quote the words of M. Valery Radot, M. Pasteur's 

 son-in-law, and his recognised organ : — " Easily inoculable 

 and fatal to the ox, the slieep, the rabbit and the guinea pig, 

 splenic fever is very rare in the dog and pig. These must 

 be inoculated several times before they contract the disease, 

 and even then it is not always possible to produce it." He 

 proceeds to state that fowls never take it, but that if they 

 are artificially chilled they do take it easily — (the logic is not 

 mine) — and it proves exceedingly fatal to them. 



Now all this simply .shows that under varying circum- 

 stances of temperature and of intensity of the contagion, the 

 microbe afiects different animals, including those rarely 

 susceptible, and those supposed to he never susceptible to 

 its infiuence. 



Now for the Rheims experiments, to which so much 

 importance has been attached. A walled-in vine3'ard of 1 9 

 acres (8 hectares) was greatl}^ infested with rabbits, and 

 when they had multiplied so much that there was not 

 sufticent hei'bage left to keep them from starvation, the 

 amiable old lady to whom the place belonged had them fed 

 each day with hay and dry clover. After some time, 

 however, even she found that it was too much and called in 

 M. Pasteur, who saturated the food with his cholera-poisoned 

 broth, and in two or three days there where hardly any of 

 them left. That is, that famished rabbits within an enclo- 

 sure and accustomed to artificial food one day find that food 

 poisoned and die accordingly, a result that might safely have 

 been predicted even by non-scientific people, and that is all. 

 One reason why this experiment was not dangerous and, 

 indeed, ^jrobably why it was allowed to be performed at all : 

 it was not done in summei', and still less in the fierce heat 

 and far sweeping dust storms of our plain; it was done in the 

 depth of a French winter and amid falling snow. 



Again, he inoculates one or more sheep, and allows others 

 to be in the fields with the poisoned rabbits, and says they 

 cannot take it because they did not become infected then, 

 but this, too, was done in the depth of winter ; and all know 

 how much the action of zymotic poisons is affected by 

 season and temperature. 



