ANTHRAX IS ALSO A VIRUS DISEASE 293 



at full flood, and where studies on rabies had already 

 commenced, was now added a public life not less active. 

 He must superintend the manufacture and the sending 

 out of the vaccine wherever public or private experiments 

 were made, must inquire into the results, details of 

 which were never given in sufficient number or pre- 

 cisely enough, must reply to the demands for information, 

 to the fears which preceded an experiment, to the com- 

 plaints which sometimes followed it. Pasteur carried 

 on almost all this correspondence himself. He must 

 also reply to criticisms and to sly attacks as well as 

 to those of open war. Nor were his adversaries confined 

 to France. Koch and his pupil, Loffler, for example, 

 had published against the theory and practice of vaccina- 

 tion some awkward and fruitless criticisms, which they 

 must regret to-day. In this continual strife, Bouley 

 made himself the champion of Pasteur and devoted 

 his whole spirit to the task. 



Thanks to these prodigious efforts, thanks to the 

 precision of the results, the practice of vaccination 

 quickly became the custom, and when publishing, in 

 1894, in the Annales de I'Institut Pasteur, the statistics 

 on anthrax vaccination on sheep and cattle, M. Chamber- 

 land was able to state, that in the case of the former 

 a total of 3,400,000 animals had been vaccinated in 

 10 years with a mortality of less than 1 per cent; in the 

 case of the second, a total of 438,000 had been vacci- 

 nated with a mortality of about 3 per thousand. Finally, 

 he estimated the beneficial results for French agriculture 

 from the use of vaccines at 5,000,000 francs for sheep, 

 and 2,000,000 francs for cattle. It is evident that if 

 the laboratory had been laboriously painstaking, it was 

 not labor lost. It is anthrax vaccination that first 

 spread through the public mind faith in the science of 

 microbes. 



