Ill PASTEUR AND HYDROPHOBIA 123 



of all those devoted to scientific research the pro- 

 foundest gratitude towards M. Pasteur, since, by the 

 direct practical application which his genius has 

 enabled him to give to the results of his inquiries, he 

 has done more than any living man to enable the 

 unlearned to arrive at a conception of the possible 

 value of the vast mass of scientific results items of 

 new knowledge which must be continually gathered 

 by less gifted individuals and stored for the future 

 use of inventors and of those doubly -gifted men 

 who, like M. Pasteur, are at once discoverers and 

 inventors discoverers of a scientific principle and 

 inventors of its application to human require- 

 ments. 



M. Pasteur's first experiment in relation to hydro- 

 phobia was made in December 1880, when he inocu- 

 lated two rabbits with the mucus from the mouth of 

 a child which had died of that disease. As his in- 

 quiries extended he found that it was necessary to 

 establish by means of experiment even the most 

 elementary facts with regard to the disease, for the 

 existing knowledge on the subject was extremely 

 small, and much of what passed for knowledge was 

 only ill-founded tradition. 



So little was hydrophobia understood, and to so 

 small an extent had it been studied, previously to 

 M. Pasteur's investigations, that it was regarded by a 

 certain number of highly competent physicians and 

 physiologists (although this was not the general view) 

 as a condition of the nervous system brought about by 

 the infliction of a punctured inflammatory wound in 



