166 Spectfic and Contagious Diseases. 
we hesitate to include the fox? Surely when heis known 
to be “on the mad march,” it would be safe to bring him 
down before he commits any serious damage. The 
farmer sees such an animal now and again, his errand 
being the spreading of the virus of rabies by means of 
his bite, and on he goes again with a business purpose, 
until he dies from exhaustion. Powder and shot accu- 
rately applied have a strictly legitimate use in this direc- 
tion. A grain of prevention is worth a hundredweight of 
cure. 
Regulations to these ends properly enforced, aided by 
useful information printed on the back of the annual 
Dog Licence, would prevent many mistakes, and bring 
the disease within a small and manageable compass. 
After all, rabies is not so prevalent, except in the dis- 
ordered imagination of persons ignorant of the disease, 
as is generally believed. Among the three hundred 
thousand dogs which have passed through the home at 
Battersea in twenty years, the Manager informed Dr. 
Gordon Stables that he had never seen one suffering 
from rabies. The majority of animals destroyed for 
supposed rabies are doubtless epileptics, and such results 
are inevitable so long as policemen rank as scientists in 
such matters. 
The Pasteurian System.—The utterly futile nature of 
remedies propounded for the cure of hydrophobia in 
the human subject has led to diligent search for others. 
The great difficulty which confronts the practitioner is 
the extremely rapid and fatal course after divect inocula- 
tion. In utter defiance of the physiological action of 
remedies the fell disease proceeds without deviation, and 
the inevitable end in death cannot be averted. Thus 
far internal remedies have failed, but the fact has stimu- 
lated research in other directions. The disease has been 
studied from other aspects. Its existence is believed by 
some to depend upon the presence of a microbe, but 
Pasteur, whose investigations have been extensive, has 
not endorsed the view. His efforts were directed towards 
sterilising the poison within the system of the person 
bitten by the mad dog. Briefly, the operation consists of 
