THE LABORATORY OF THE ECOLE NORMALE. 297 



for communicating the disease with certainty. The 

 experiments were multiplied ; all the dogs which were 

 trepanned, and which received on the surface of the 

 brain a little of the medulla of the rabid animal, 

 succumbed to the disease, with very rare exceptions, 

 within a period of twenty days. Did not the method 

 pursued demonstrate, among other things, that hydro- 

 phobia is a disease of the brain ; that the seat of the 

 rabic virus, far from being exclusively in the saliva, 

 belongs, above all, to the cerebral matter ? 



Other results, in addition to this one, were not slow 

 in revealing themselves. It was established that not 

 only the brain, but the spinal marrow, along its whole 

 length, may be rabic, and that the nerves themselves 

 throughout their whole system, from the centre to the 

 periphery, may contain the virus of hydrophobia. If 

 there exists a microbe of hydrophobia, its medium 

 of cultivation in the body is, par excellence, the brain, 

 the spinal marrow, and the nerves. It was also 

 established that there were localisations of virus in 

 certain parts of the mucous system, and that the very 

 considerable differences of rabic symptoms which exist 

 in different cases of hydrophobia, must be sought for 

 in this fact. At the moment of death the medulla 

 oblongata is always rabic. Finally, it was established 

 that hydrophobia could be given (and almost as 

 rapidly as by trepanning) by inoculating rabic nervous 

 matter into the circulation of the blood by a vein* 



x 



