180 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria. 



respectfully advises the Australian Governments to refuse 

 their permission to any person to introduce any form of 

 disease for the purpose of checking the rabbit plague, until 

 the whole question has been fully considered." 



Mr. Jackson seconded the motion. Dr. Wigg had done 

 a great service to the Society in calling attention to the 

 subject. He gathered from the remarks that had been 

 made, that it was not yet certain whether or not this disease 

 would be communicated from one set of rabbits to another 

 set. If it were not so communicable, then its value as a 

 means of ridding the country of the pest would be nil. If, 

 on the other hand, it were valuable for the purpose of 

 ridding the country of the pest, by being easily commu- 

 nicable, it would have the disadvantage of carrying off a 

 great proportion of the number of domestic fowls and other 

 birds. It seemed to him, that the people here were on the 

 horns of a dilemma. From either point of view, it was 

 desirable to prevent the importation of the disease into 

 the colony. 



The President said that before the motion was put, he 

 would like to say a word or two. He did not speak as a 

 medical man, nor as a biologist. He was an engineer, and, 

 he trusted, a scientific one. It had been said, that 

 M. Pasteur's investigations of the vine disease and the 

 silk worm were models of scientific investigation. On the 

 strength of that, it might be assumed that his experiments 

 with the chicken cholera had been equally exhaustive and 

 minute. If that were so, it was strange that no information 

 of such an exact investigation was to be met with. An 

 experiment, unless it were properly arranged and tried, 

 would be simply misleading. There had appeared in The 

 Argus a column or more containing the extraordinary 

 story about the rabbits in Madame Pomeroy's vineyard. 

 He was greatly astonished that such unscientific proceedings 

 should be put forward as a conclusive experiment. 

 Suppose instead that a solitary infected rabbit had been 

 placed in that 19-acre paddock, and that then in tlie course 

 of a week the rabbits had died the inference would have 

 been difi'erent. The result obtained by M. Pasteur was 

 in no way different from that arrived at by Mr. Bosisto 

 simply by the use of arsenic. One ot the first questions 

 that occurred to him was, could not the same result have 

 been obtained with any ordinary poison, and if chicken 

 cholera was not different to ordinary poisons that were 



