406 
A. LIAUTARD. 
A second vaccination is performed some ten or thirteen days 
after, a little behind and on one side of the first, carefully follow¬ 
ing the same method. 
The result of these manipulations will be a state of immunity. 
Inoculations performed some days afterwards with the strongest 
virus will fail to produce any bad result, and this protection 
against the disease will last for a length of time extending sev¬ 
eral months. 
Grand and beneficial as these results are in the various points 
of view from which they may be considered, I do not know if they 
are not surpassed by those already obtained in relation to another 
disease, hydrophobia. 
This disease, so terrible in its aspect and results, so treacher¬ 
ous in its development, and so insidious that its name alone is 
almost a synonym for a frightful death, has now lost a great deal 
of its character by the recent discovery which we also owe to 
Pasteur and to his collaborators. And when we consider j that 
we are on the point of mastering it, of protecting from its at¬ 
tacks an animal which is often almost a member of our house¬ 
holds, and thus in many instances of protecting ourselves, and 
perhaps preventing its development in the unfortunate human 
being who may have become inoculated with it, I cannot help 
repeating it, the question must present itself, which of these two 
discoveries of Pasteur, that of anthrax or that of rabies, will be 
the more beneficial to mankind. 
Mysterious in its incubation, and so horrid in its symptoms 
and results, Mr. Pasteur has been studying its nature since 1880, 
and at last has succeeded in establishing the fact of its parasitic 
nature, and more than that, of giving by various processes a re¬ 
fractory condition to animals properly inoculated with attenuated 
virus. I specify the “ attenuated,” for it has been proved that 
by the successive passages through given organisms, the virus 
would lose a certain amount of its virulency and, so to speak, be¬ 
come attenuated. 
The results that were obtained in his laboratory were ac¬ 
counted to be so important that a committee of scientists were 
appointed to test them. What were those results? Firstly, the 
