SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. II. No. 45. 



germ impaired in its vigor. His preliminary 

 experiments convinced him that lie had 

 achieved success, and then came one of 

 those dramatic public exhibitions in which 

 Pasteur so delighted and which have so im- 

 pressed the world. Almost before the public 

 had learned that he had obtained a possible 

 method of preventing this dread disease 

 among agriculturists, Pasteur made arrange- 

 ments for a public test of his method, and 

 in the presence of an audience of some 200 

 experts made up of physicians, veterina- 

 rians. Senators, prefects, farmers, members 

 of the French Academy and others of high 

 standing, he demonstrated by a simple ex- 

 periment, lasting about a week, that he 

 could with unerring certainty prevent cattle 

 from acquirhig anthrax; that he could give 

 to them a practically absolute immunity 

 against this almost surely fatal disease by 

 infecting them with a very mUd indisposi- 

 tion a few days before. The effect upon the 

 audience was electrical and their enthusiasm 

 knew no bounds. Pasteur's experiments 

 spread at once over the world, and from 

 this further practical application of his 

 scientific research his reputation made 

 another advance. His anthrax vaccine 

 was distributed through the civilized world, 

 was used by grazing communities every- 

 where, and it has been thought to have 

 saved the life of hundreds of thousands of 

 cattle. The greatness of this discovery 

 can hardly be appreciated to-day. It 

 was a logical discovery of a new method 

 of meeting disease. "While other even more 

 valuable discoveries in the same line have 

 followed and are still to follow, none can 

 equal in significance this first application of 

 the studies of the microscope to the treat- 

 ment of disease. 



Following the work upon anthrax various 

 other lines of bacteriological research con- 

 nected with diseases of animals attracted 

 his attention and demanded his time. It 

 It was not, however, until he had attacked 



the problem of the most dreaded of all 

 human diseases, hydrophobia, that he again 

 attracted the public eye. His expeiiments 

 upon hydrophobia were, perhaps, the bold- 

 est ui the line of experimentation that had 

 ever occurred, for here for the first time in 

 history laboratory experiments were trans- 

 ferred to the human being. Hydrophobia 

 had fascinated Pasteur for a long time. 

 Experimental work bad shown him that 

 the disease was not a purely nervous excita- 

 tion, as had been claimed, but that there 

 was an actual disease under this name. 

 Experiments showed him further that the 

 disease bears every similarity to infectious 

 germ diseases, although neither he nor any- 

 one else, even to the present day, have suc- 

 ceeded in demonstratiug the organism which 

 produces the diseases. Experiments upon 

 dogs and rabbits in his laboratory followed 

 each other rapidly ,and with his usual genius 

 he devised many a method of hastening the 

 experiments and of rapidly reaching results 

 which would normally take months. His 

 success with other diseases made him am- 

 bitious also to find a method of preventing 

 this disease, and, while tlie methods which 

 he had used in fowl cholera and anthrax 

 proved useless in the case of hydrophobia, 

 the same general line of work led him 

 finally to a method of inoculating animals 

 which rendered them immune against this 

 disease. Not only so, but the same method 

 when apj)lied in a slightly different way 

 was found to be eificacious in warding 

 off the disease in an animal which had been 

 previouslj^ inoculated therewith. He found 

 himself able with certainty to inoculate an 

 animal with hydrophobia and then, b}' treat- 

 ing him with the various subdermic injec- 

 tions which he had devised, prevent the ap- 

 pearance of the disease which would have 

 otherwise inevitably occurred. Laboratory 

 experiments were a success, and next the 

 bold step was taken of applying to mankiad 

 laboratory methods, which had been hither- 



