Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/307

Rh M. Pasteur replied that no experiments bearing on that point had yet been made.

On the 30th of October four other persons came from Arcachon to place themselves under M. Pasteur's care; so that, if success is gained in these cases also, six demonstrations will have been obtained from human subjects of the efficacy of the inoculation treatment. In an interview with a correspondent of the London "Times," M. Pasteur explained the philosophy of his treatment by stating that the virus acted very slowly, and, while he was making the body refractory to it by repeated inoculations, the virus deposited by the bite localized itself in the region of the wound. Whatever this region, that virus becomes digested during the year and a half which he has found by experiment the inoculation lasts, and will no longer exist in the body. As the propagation of the virus, which has always an ascending tendency and directs itself to the brain, takes place so slowly that the minimum of the total inoculation with it is thirty days, the whole question consists in inoculating the patient soon enough to prevent the propagation of the virus through the wound from spreading. In the case of Jupille, after the lapse of six days, the virus through the wounds had not yet left the hands. Consequently, it had not yet penetrated into any of the regions where its presence causes an outbreak of rabies. It will remain cooped up, till after some months it will have been digested and expelled.

There would be no need to dwell on the value of M. Pasteur's discovery, the "Times" suggestively remarks, "were it not for the strange perversity of those who will only see in the whole story a fresh ground for attacking physiological experiment. Such people, as we know from long experience, will lose all sight of the thousands and tens of thousands of animals whom M. Pasteur liberates from the curse, and of the multitudes of human beings freed from torture and death, when they think of the twenty or fifty rabbits in his laboratory. They forget, in the contemplation of a few cases of immediate suffering, the innumerable animals, friends of man, whom the discovery will set free. "With these excellent people it is impossible to argue; but men whose sympathies are wider and whose sight is truer than theirs will unite in paying homage to the man who, if what he tells us is confirmed, has worked so patiently and so wisely to so noble and beneficent an end."— of "The Popular Science Monthly."]