32 P roceed'Diys of tke Royal Society of Victoria. 



occur when these are brought into contact with a new 

 choleraic disease ? Next, besides the fact that in France the 

 choleraic microbe is on a worn out soil — worn out for its own 

 purposes, I mean — we must remember that the frosts and 

 snows and rains of the long winter there are unfavourable to 

 the extension of the microbe, while in that country of small 

 farms, where every range of trees, every growing field, acts as 

 a filter, the conditions are totally dissimilar to those on our 

 vast sweeps of plain, "growing weather" all through the win- 

 ter, and dust winds raking the country sti'aight down from the 

 rabbit infected fields to the fertile distiicts of the coast. Is 

 there, then, any certainty as to what would be the result of 

 the introduction here of this poison ? There is no certainty. 

 Microbes of some of the most malignant diseases are sterile 

 in certain countries ; thus, although typhus fever is endemic 

 in England and Ireland, we have never had one case in 

 Australia. It seems as if it could not live out here. And 

 the poison of the yellow fever of America dies out rapidly in 

 England. So it may be with the chicken cholera in the 

 colonies, but that is only a I'emote chance, and — no one 

 knows. 



Lastly, is there any reason why we should endanger our 

 flocks, our green crops, the whole prosperity of tlie country, 

 at a word from M. Pasteur ? He is a man who has done 

 brilliant scientific work, especially in the diseases of silk- 

 worms, the diseases of wine, and the investigation of zymotic 

 disease, but who has the intensely French pasbion for 

 pushing great ideas further than they will go. 



A few brief references to his last great work, the cure of 

 hydrophobia, will illustrate my meaning, and at the same 

 time give us a salutary caution as to believing too much of 

 what we are vaguely and grandiloquently told about his 

 successes. He attenuates the virus of mad dogs by passing 

 it through the systems of a rabbit and a monkey, and then 

 injects with modified cultures, usually from the monkey's 

 brain, into men and dogs as a ])rotective and curative 

 measure. For a year or two all went on well, and one 

 enthusiastic writer even declared that he had " built (upon 

 mad dogs) the eternal temj)le of his fame." Centres for mad 

 dog vaccination were established at Vienna, Buda-Pesth, and 

 half a dozen other towns ; and in March iy8(i, w^e find from 

 the Lancet that 350 cases had been treated by M. Pasteur, 

 and that but one death had occurred, and that in a case 

 recognised as very serious from the beginning. On loth 



