The congratulatory style in which our contemporaries chronicle the fact
that M. Pasteur has inoculated two hundred animals with rabies,—ono of the most frightful of all diseases to the sufferer,—without, as it would seem, the slightest reason to suppose that this success in tor- turing living creatures by inflicting on them one of the most terrible forms of death will lead to any discovery of either alleviation or cure, is to us extremely surprising. Why should it be " gratifying " that M. Pasteur has turned his attention to the subject, when the only consequence of that attention has been the horrible death of some two hundred creatures, and the successful resistance of four dogs, for reasons quite unknown to M. Pasteur, to the contagion of the virus P If we had heard that in the course of experiments on the best mode of extinguishing conflagrations, two hundred houses had been set on fire and burnt to the ground, while four other houses had, for reasons quite unknown to the experimenters, resisted all attempts to set them on fire, nobody would think it "gratifying," but rather horrifying. But if so, M. Pasteur's experiments should certainly be thought much more horrifying. The assumption of the physiological experimentalists that the more success a great experimentalist like M. Pasteur has in causing disease, the more success he may expect to have in curing it, is one of the strangest of human superstitions, and the recklessness displayed in relation to the inevitable agony inflicted, is one of the most disheartening of all the moral symptom% of our time.
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