Miss Cobbe has had a little controversy with Professor Ray
Lankester in the Weekly Dispatch, on the subject of M. Pasteur's reckless,—we ourselves should say, mad,—proposal for poison- ing the Australian rabbits with the bacteria of chicken-cholera,— a controversy in which the reasonableness certainly seems to us, —and, as we believe, will seem to almost every eminent physician and surgeon in London,—all on the side of thewoman Professor Ray Lankester had written on March 11th, with the utmost dogmatism,—" There is no fear of the cholera des poules being extended to other animals than the rabbits. It does not attack larger animals. The domestic fowls will be protected by the fact that they are in farmyards, and not in the open. The flesh of rabbits tinned after death from cholera des ponies would be innocuous,"—a statement which, we venture to say, would not be regarded as a safe one by nine out of ten of the most eminent of the scientific physicians of England. Miss Cobbe, in the Weekly Dispatch of March 18th, asks for the grounds of Professor Ray Lankester's certainty on this head; whereupon Professor La,nkester reproaches her with assuming that such tinned rabbits must be poisonous. Miss Cobbe, however, had assumed nothing of the kind, but simply that till such tinned rabbits had been freely eaten by human beings and found innocuous, it would be the utmost rashness to assume that such food is whole- some. Now, the fact being, as every one knows, that the flesh of animals which die of disease of any kind is very seldom wholesome, and the only evidence tending in any degree to the contrary, in this case, being that, according to an experiment of M. Pasteur's, tried too on a very inadequate scale, sheep seem not to be immediately susceptible to the influence of the chicken-cholera poison,—Miss Cobbe seems to us to be asking only what every prudent physician in England would ask, when she requires evidence that such ambiguous food as this is not dangerous before any one is advised to eat it. But Pro- fessor Ray Lankester is rash enough,—we may say, foolhardy enough,—to encourage everybody who may have the chance of eating the tinned flesh of rabbits killed by chicken-cholera, to eat it without fear of evil consequences, though he can pro- duce no evidence that any man ever did eat it with impunity. Of what extreme of folly will not the scientific mind be guilty, if only that folly opens out the chance of gaining new support for a favourite scientific thesis !
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