Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/390

390 Minister of Public Instruction, to appoint a commission to which I may submit the dogs I have rendered insusceptible to rabies.

The crucial experiment which I should try at the first opportunity would be to take from my kennels twenty dogs insusceptible to rabies, which should be put in comparison with twenty other dogs. The forty dogs should be caused to be bitten successively by rabid dogs. If the statements which I have made are correct, the twenty dogs deemed by me insusceptible will all escape, while the other twenty will be attacked by rabies. In a second experiment, not less decisive, forty dogs would be used, of which twenty had been previously vaccinated, and the others had not. The forty dogs should be trepanned with the virus of a mad dog. The twenty vaccinated dogs would escape, and the other twenty would all die of rabies, with paralysis, or with mania.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.



T will perhaps be sufficient, in response to numerous inquiries addressed to me respecting the supposed religious bearing of these papers, to remark that they are not intended to have any religious bearing whatsoever. I am simply inquiring what are the rules of conduct suggested when each person takes as his guiding principle the increase of the happiness of those around, an expression which must be taken as including himself in the same somewhat Hibernian sense in which Milton included Adam among "those since born, his sons." I may add that nearly all the letters addressed to me have been interesting, and some have been singularly well-reasoned—all utterly unlike the rather spiteful and very silly letters I referred to in a foot-note to my last paper. Yet I can not suffer the religious element to be imported into the subject—no matter how courteously or kindly the thing may be done. I have just the same objection to see the question of the evolution of conduct considered from that side, which the student of astronomy or geology has against dealing with the objections and difficulties raised by those who seem always to suspect that under the teachings of God's work, the universe, there may lie some grievous deceptions if not some monstrous falsehoods. If my reasoning is bad, it can be met and overcome on its own ground.

I may, however, make this general remark with regard to all systems of morality whatsoever, including those which have come before men in company with religious teachings. Without a single exception 