58 New Researches on Canine Madness . [February, 
Nor is this lamentable consummation at all rare among 
us. The deaths from hydrophobia in England and Wales 
reach a yearly mean of 35, — a considerable number to be 
sacrificed to the mere caprice of some of our neighbours. 
I am well aware that certain moralists, and a few other 
writers who might perhaps be styled ^moralists, maintain 
that the original cause of rabies must be sought in confine- 
ment, chains, and muzzles. To this assertion I am content 
to oppose the well-known fadf that this disease is by no 
means uncommon among wolves in France, Spain, and other 
continental countries, and is exceedingly common among 
jackals and pariah dogs in the East. 
Having thus proof positive that increased liberty is no 
remedy, the public may turn with the greater interest to the 
recent experiments which have been undertaken by M. 
Pasteur, with a view to tracing the origin of, and if possible 
discovering, the remedy for this scourge. I premise that 
these experiments of necessity involve a certain amount of 
what is, in Victoria Street, shrieked at as “ Vivisedfion.” 
But even experimental research has been so far beset with 
difficulties. Hitherto the saliva has been the only matter in 
which the presence of the virus has been actually proved ; 
but, as M. Pasteur remarks, “ the saliva, whether inoculated 
by a bite, or by diredt injedtion into the cellular tissue, does 
not communicate the disease with certainty, and when the 
malady does appear it is only after an ‘ incubation * of vari- 
able and undetermined length.” Hence the results of 
experimentation have been hitherto of little value. Had 
M. Pasteur been a Lord Chief Justice or a Msenad he might 
have moralised on the uncertainty of “ Vivisedfion ” and 
have abandoned the study of rabies in despair. Fortunately 
he was a man of Science, and as such he adted on the prin- 
ciple that if any method of experimentation gives doubtful 
results it must be modified. He found that the principal 
seat of the poison of rabies is the central nervous system. 
Here it may be obtained in a state of purity and in sufficient 
quantity. Further, if this matter is brought in contadt either 
with the surface of the brain or is injedted into a vein, rabies 
is induced not possibly and after the lapse of a longer or 
shorter time, but invariably and immediately. Thanks to 
these two observations the disease can now be scientifically 
studied, and the value of any proposed method of treatment 
can be rigorously tested. The principal results which M. 
Pasteur has formally obtained, and which he now puts for- 
ward as fully established, are that mute and furious rabies — 
or rather all the forms of the disease — proceed from one and 
