296 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



of experimental inquiry in this direction. A lady whose 

 philanthropy has rendered her illustrious said to me some 

 time ago that science was becoming immoral; that the re- 

 searches of the past, unlike those of the present, were car- 

 ried on without cruelty. I replied to her that the science 

 of Kepler and Newton, to which she refererd, dealt with 

 the. laws and phenomena of inorganic nature ; but that one 

 great advance made by modern science was in the direc- 

 tion of biology, or the science of life; and that in this 

 new direction scientific inquiry, though at the outset pur- 

 sued at the cost of some temporary suffering, would in the 

 end prove a thousand times more beneficent than it had 

 ever hitherto been. I said this because I saw that the 

 very researches which the lady deprecated were leading 

 us to such a knowledge of epidemic diseases as will en- 

 able us finally to sweep these scourges of the human race 

 from the face of the earth. 



This is a point of such capital importance that I should 

 like to bring it home to your intelligence by a single trust- 

 worthy illustration. In 1850, two distinguished French 

 observers, MM. Davainne and Kayer, noticed in the blood 

 of animals which had died of the virulent disease called 

 splenic fever small microscopic organisms resembling trans- 

 parent rods, but neither of them at that time attached any 

 significance to the observation. In 1861, Pasteur pub- 

 lished a memoir on the fermentation of butyric acid, 

 wherein he described the organism which provoked it; 

 and after reading this memoir it occurred to Davainne 

 that splenic fever might be a case of fermentation set up 

 within the animal body by the organisms which had been 

 observed by him and Bayer. This idea has been placed 

 beyond all doubt by subsequent research. 



