M. Pasteur's attention has been attracted by the prize of
225,000 offered by the Government of New South Wales for some mode of destroying the rabbits which have become a pest there, and he proposes in the Tempo what seems to us an almost diabolic expedient,—namely, to transport to New South Wales the microbe of chicken-cholera, by which poultry are sometimes utterly devastated, and to spread the disease among the rabbits by watering their food with contaminated soup, in which this microbe would be conveyed to them. In other words, M. Pasteur suggests acclimatising in Australia a new animal disease of a highly epidemic character. It is a remarkable proposal, and bears out the contention we have always put forward in these columns, that science is becoming more and more unscrupulous in its manipulation of the mighty bat only half-understood agencies which it has itself discovered. The physiologists tarn viviaection into a scourge, and now the same class,—for M. Pasteur is not a physician weighted with the responsibilities of a professor of the healing ark—are preparing to wield a still more powerful scourge,—to spread plague with truly sublime rashness amongst our poor fellow-creatures, and this without any possibility of knowing what this tremendous instrument may effect. A human wielder of thunderbolts may easily chance to ruin what it never entered into his head to assail.
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