The Lord Mayor's meeting to give support to the Pasteur
Institute in Paris, on Monday, was as unanimous, to use Mr. Lowell's happy simile, as "Jonah in the whale," but the reason was simple,—that all opposition was deliberately excluded. So far as we can judge, the strong points of the physiologists who contend for Pasteurism are that,—(1), Dogs " protected " by repeated Pasteur inoculations, and afterwards bitten by a really mad dog, do not go mad, where other dogs not so pro- tected, and bitten by the same dog, do go mad; and (2), that human beings belonging to the Class A mentioned by Mr. Victor Horsley in his letter in another column,—i.e., bitten by dogs proved to be rabid,—are said to die in very much smaller • proportion if treated by M. Pasteur, than those so bitten
-who are not treated by M. Pasteur's method. The case on the other side is that inoculation before a bite, as a pro- phylactic, may very well succeed, where inoculation after a bite would fail,—vaccination seldom or never succeeds, we believe, if the small-pox virus is already in the system,— and next, that we have no means of knowing whether, in the comparatively few cases of bite by certainly mad dogs, the virus may not have been removed, either by sucking or caustic, or the interposition of clothes between the dog's mouth and the wound ; so that the statistics are not so impressive as they appear. On the other hand, the whole system of deliberately infecting a great number of animals with rabies M. order to supply the Pasteur method with virus and with tests of rabies, is so !evoking, as to render humane beings very reluctant to find a cure in this direction ; while M. Pasteur's incredible and amazing rashness in the proposal to kill off the New Sovth Wales rabbits by chicken-cholera - has rendered it quite impossible for reasonable men to regard his authority with the respect which Professor Tyndall ex- presses for it. The Prince of Wales was certainly ill-advised in accepting a brief for the advocacy of M. Pasteur's method.
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