Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/375

Rh own country, and Tyndall and Huxley in ours. A few physicians and surgeons of scientific training in France and England recognized the importance of his discoveries, such as Alphonse Guérin, Villemin and Vulpin, in his own country, while Lister in ours was already at work, had experimented widely and wrote his memorable letter of congratulation to Pasteur in 1874, informing him of the work he had been doing in introducing antiseptic surgery in England during the preceding nine years. Against this intrepid little band of experimental scientists were massed all the batteries of orthodox medical nescience served by the distinguished physicians and surgeons of the time; but truth is mighty and must prevail. Davaine applying Pasteur's principles in a medical direction had found out the bacterial origin of anthrax, and although he was violently attacked by oratorical arguments in opposition to experimental proofs, and accused, as many physiologists are to-day of having "destroyed very many animals and saved very few human beings," his facts held fast, and combined with the later experiments of Koch and of Pasteur, not merely established the etiology of anthrax as we know it to-day, but gave a support and forward growth to that new-born babe, Bacteriology, which without such animal experiments could never have grown into the beneficent giant that it is to-day in all its glorious strength for the weal of humanity.

Pasteur himself meanwhile was hard at work in the small ill-equipped laboratory of physiological chemistry of the EcoleÉcole [sic] Normale at Paris from which the fame of his discoveries began rapidly to spread and shed a new light forth on the medical world. Pasteur at this stage had already largely rehabilitated the national prosperity of his own country by his successful researches on silk-worm disease and on fermentation maladies and the diseases of wines. All this effect upon national industries, it is to be noted, followed on from an inquiry of apparently no practical importance on spontaneous generation. He now turned his genius towards disease, there also utilizing the same discovery arising from a research that contained at first sight no possible applications to disease and the remainder of his life was devoted to the extension of these studies. The subsequent history of this discovery is the science of bacteriology with all its ramifications and manifold applications in industry, in agriculture, in medicine and in public health, investigated by the experimental method by thousands of willing workers all over the civilized world. Who but the ignorant Philistine, who knows not what he prates about, can deny the profound influence of animal experimentation, and the philosophic application of the principle of research upon the history of the world?

Let us now, from the vantage-point of the present, look back at the past and glean from the study of the manner in which this science took origin some knowledge to guide us, first, as to how research may be