FioAitoN — Pasteur Centenary Celebration. 57 



strong ! "Why cannot I begin a new life of study and work ? Unhappy 

 France, dear country, if I could only assist in raising thee from thy 

 disasters ! " 



After the war of 1870, Pasteur turned his whole attention to industrial 

 chemistry. " Our misfortune," he wrote, in the preface to his famous 

 treatise on Brewing, " prompted me with the idea of these researches. I 

 undertook them, immediately after the war in 1870, with the determination 

 of perfecting them, and thereby benefiting a branch of industry wherein we 

 are undoubtedly surpassed by the Germans." 



This task completed, he returned to the study of infective diseases. As 

 his grandson, M. Vallery-Eadot, has written : " Infinitely small organisms 

 appeared to Pasteur as the terrific disorganizers of living tissues. . . . Might 

 there not exist a particular germ in connexion with each infective disease, 

 just as every fermentation is caused by a special ferment ? " 



In 1873 he was elected a member of the French Academy of Medicine, 

 and thereby strengthened his position. 



Widespread epidemics of anthrax had been carrying off enormous 

 numbers of sheep and cattle in France; whilst in Eussia some 56,000 head 

 of cattle were destroyed in two years. A rod-shaped organism had been 

 found in the blood of animals killed by anthrax, but the discoverer, Davaine, 

 had been unable to convince agriculturalists of its connexion with the disease. 

 Once more Pasteur's technique was equal to the occasion. He isolated and 

 cultivated the bacillus, and showed beyond question that it was the cause of 

 the disease. Then, seeking for a remedy, he found that if sheep were 

 inoculated with cultures of the bacillus grown artificially at blood -temperature 

 (36° 0.) all the sheep died ; but if the bacillus were grown at a somewhat 

 higher temperature (42° (J.), and kept for fourteen days, the sheep, after 

 inoculation, developed a very mild form of anthrax, from which they recovered, 

 and were then found to be immune from the ordinary fatal form of anthrax. 

 The introduction of the weakened form of the anthrax bacillus into the sheep's 

 body leads to the production of defensive substances which are able to repel 

 a subsequent invasion of the disease, just as if the sleeping garrison of some 

 outpost was roused by the detonation of a harmless firework, and so prepared 

 for an attack by more deadly agents. 



Pasteur presented his results in a famous paper read before the Academy 

 of Science in 1881. The work was received with some show of hostility by 

 the orthodox veterinary surgeons present, so a demonstration on a large 

 scale was arranged by the Melun Agricultural Society. Fifty sheep were 

 infected with the most virulent form of anthrax ; twenty-five of them had 

 previously been rendered immune by the Pasteur method. Two days 



