f maladies
and plagues might be completely disarmed of their terrors by the
process of inoculation. The name of Pasteur became more and more
famous. The celebrated Pasteur Institute was founded at Paris, under
the patronage of the French Government, and in some sense under the
patronage of the whole world. To this establishment diseased subjects
were taken for treatment, and here experimentation was carried on over
a wide range of facts.

The value of the results attained can hardly be overestimated. The
fear which mankind have long entertained on account of plagues and
epidemics, and the loss which the animal industries of the world have
sustained, were largely abated. As yet the use of the Pasteur methods
for the prevention and cure of disease is by no means universal; but
the knowledge which has come of his investigations and of the results
of them has diffused itself among all civilized nations, and the
hygienic condition of almost every community has been most favorably
affected by the new knowledge which we possess of bacteria and of the
means of destroying them.

Pasteur, whose recent death has been mourned by the best part of
mankind, was an explorer and forerunner. His industry in his chosen
field of investigation was prodigious. When he was already nearly
seventy years of age, he undertook the investigation of hydrophobia,
with the purpose of discovering, if he might, the germ of that dreaded
disease, thus preparing a method for inoculation against it.

Hydrophobia is one of the most subtle diseases ever known. So obscure
and uncertain are its phenomena that many able men have been led to
doubt the _existence_ of such a disease! The mythological origin of
the malady in the supposed influence of a dog-star seemed to
strengthen the view that hydrophobia, as a specific disease, does not
exist. It is undeniably true that the great majority of the cases of
so-called rabies are pure myths. Under investigation they melt away
into nothing but alarm and fiction. However, there appeared to be a
residue of actual hydrophobia, though the disease as tested by its
name exists in fancy rather than fact.

In any event, Pasteur began to investigate hydrophobia, and at length
discovered the bacilli which produce it. At least he found in animals
affected with rabies, notably in the spinal marrow of such animals,
minute living organisms, having the form of thread-like animalculae,
with heads at one end. The microscope showed