NEW CONCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE 



tation of beer was due solely to the presence of 

 minute organisms, microbes, was made early in the 

 sixties. That was forty years ago. Step by step 

 the ideas of Pasteur grew and broadened. Applied 

 to the disease of the vines, then to dying silk- worms, 

 then to sheep-cholera, they are estimated, before his 

 death, to have saved to France alone a sum greater 

 than the cost of the Prussian War, with the colossal 

 indemnity demanded by Bismarck thrown in. Pas- 

 teur's own researches culminated in the germ the- 

 ory of contagions. A young English surgeon, now 

 Lord Lister, applied his idea to the method of sur- 

 gical operations; this step was enormous. To-day 

 operations are common that were unheard of thirty 

 or forty years ago; unknown diseases, such as ap- 

 pendicitis, have been discovered and a radical cure 

 has been found for them. Germans, like Behring 

 and Koch; Japanese, like Kitasato; a crowd of dis- 

 ciples and followers of the Master, as he is lovingly 

 known in France, have extended Pasteur's ideas to 

 the treatment of diphtheria, lockjaw, anthrax, and 

 many other scourges. Thanks to him, too, hydro- 

 phobia has been robbed of its terrors. At last, 

 medicine begins dimly to emerge from quackery 

 and empiricism, and bids fair, in time, to become a 

 true science. All this belongs to the present day, 

 most of it to the last decade or so, yet in all this 

 brilliant list of discoveries and applications no 



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