tten, the worm
would go automatically through the process of spinning when it had
nothing to spin.

Pasteur followed this parasitic destroyer from year to year, and led
by his singular power of combining facts with the logic of facts,
discovered eventually the precise phase in the development of the
insect when the disease which assailed it could with certainty be
stamped out. Pasteur's devotion to this enquiry cost him dear. He
restored to France her silk husbandry, rescued thousands of her
population from ruin, set the looms of Italy also to work, but emerged
from his labours with one of his sides permanently paralysed. His
last investigation is embodied in a work entitled 'Studies on Beer,'
in which he describes a method of rendering beer permanently
unchangeable. That method is not so simple as those found effectual
with wine and vinegar, but the principles which it involves are sure
to receive extensive application at some future day.

There are other reflections connected with this subject which, even
were they now passed over without remark, would sooner or later occur
to every thoughtful mind in this assembly. I have spoken of the
floating dust of the air, of the means of rendering it visible, and of
the perfect immunity from putrefaction which accompanies the contact
of germless infusions and moteless air. Consider the woes which these
wafted particles, during historic and pre-historic ages, have
inflicted on mankind; consider the loss of life in hospitals from
putrefying wounds; consider the loss in places where there are plenty
of wounds, but no hospitals, and in the ages before hospitals were
anywhere founded; consider the slaughter which has hitherto followed
that of the battlefield, when those bacterial destroyers are let
loose, often producing a mortality far greater than that of the battle
itself; add to this the other conception that in times of epidemic
disease the self-same floating matter has frequently, if not always,
mingled with it the special germs which produce the epidemic, being
thus enabled to sow pestilence and death over nations and
continents--consider all this, and you will come with me to the
conclusion that all the havoc of war, ten times multiplied, would be
evanescent if compared with the ravages due to atmospheric dust.

This preventible destruction is going on to-day, and it has been
permitted to go on for ages, without a whisper of information
regarding its cause being vo