INDIAN NATIONAL LIFE 87 
affected the whole of Europe, a disease which rendered the 
silkworm useless for the manufacture of the silk. In one district 
of France alone over eight million pounds had been lost in 
fifteen years owing to the ravages of this disease. Pasteur 
was called in, and although he knew nothing of the industry 
or the silkworm, and was never engaged in any silk business, 
yet by the application .of his methods he got to the bottom 
of the trouble and gave a prescription for the remedy. The 
particular achievement with which Pasteur’s name is most 
associated was the last and in many respects the greatest of 
his life, that in respect to the treatment of hydrophobia. 
You happily possess two Pasteur Institutes where anti-rabic 
treatment can be given and people can be spared from the 
awful consequences that are too likely to ensue from the bite 
of a mad dog. I have no time to tell you the stages by 
which Pasteur achieved this great discovery but I think you 
will gather from this brief indication of Pasteur’s work that 
you cannot find a better example of the cultivation of science 
for the welfare of a nation. 
You may say that this is a material view of science. It 
is no doubt ina sense a material view. But it is a view of 
science that surely no benevolent person would in any way 
ignore or belittle. Health, after all, is the first consideration. 
If you have not got health you cannot have a nation at all, 
and the direction of science to the subject of public health 
‘seems to me to be one of the first calls to which a scientific 
man should respond. It is possible also to be too censorious 
about the utilitarian application of science in relation to the 
practical arts. We are often told truly enough that man 
cannot live by bread alone. At the same time man must 
have bread among other things. And a man who, like 
Pasteur, could rescue a people from industrial destruction is 
surely rendering a magnificent service to the nation to which 
he belongs. 
