RABIES AND HYDROPHOBIA. 
583 
him. So far from making us more tolerant of the dog, the 
demonstration of the spontaneous development of a deadly virus 
in this animal’s saliva, for such slight causes as have been 
assigned, would make us shun and fear him as we do the most 
venomous serpents. Fortunately for the dog, fortunately for 
mankind, and fortunately for all animated creatures, this con¬ 
ception of the self-constituted apologists for the canine species 
is without the least foundation in science and undoubtedly 
false. 
The spontaneous generation of rabies under certain condi¬ 
tions has been held by many eminent men who would not for a 
moment entertain the view that the disease developed from in¬ 
digestion, epileptic fits and other common ailments. The same 
men held that rinderpest, pleuro-pneumonia and glanders origi¬ 
nated spontaneously. But how rapidly has the belief in the ori¬ 
gin of these diseases in the absence of contagion died out since 
the discovery of the nature of contagion. Who to-day believes 
in the spontaneous origin of pleuro-pneumonia or glanders? 
We know that these diseases are caused by vegetable parasites 
of the nature of bacteria, and that if the bacillus of glanders or 
that of pleuro-pneumonia originally had its habitat in nature out¬ 
side of the animal body, as is probable, the transformation from 
a saphrophytic to a parasitic existence unquestionably required 
unusual conditions and a long period of time. That the same 
is true of the contagion of rabies follows from analogy and is 
confirmed by the failure of the disease to develop in Australia, 
and by its absence from Sweden and Norway since its eradica¬ 
tion from those countries. More recently we have seen the dis¬ 
ease in Great Britain reduced from more than 600 cases a year 
practically to zero by a few years of intelligent and systematic 
repression. Surely this result would not have been attained if 
the disease frequently originates de novo . There is no direct 
evidence in favor of the spontaneous generation of rabies ; inves¬ 
tigators who have tried to produce it by keeping dogs under 
the conditions which were said to cause it, have uniformly 
failed. The tendency of modern thought and modern knowl- 
