Chapter CCXXII

I commenced this Address by asking you to follow me in an attempt to trace the path which has been followed by a scientific idea, in its long and slow progress from the position of a probable hypothesis to that of an established law of nature. Our survey has not taken us into very attractive regions; it has lain, chiefly, in a land flowing with the abominable, and peopled with mere grubs and mouldiness. And it may be imagined with what smiles and shrugs, practical and serious contemporaries of Redi and of Spallanzani may have commented on the waste of their high abilities in toiling at the solution of problems which, though curious enough in themselves, could be of no conceivable utility to mankind.

Nevertheless, you will have observed that before we had travelled very far upon our road, there appeared, on the right hand and on the left, fields laden with a harvest of golden grain, immediately convertible into those things which the most solidly practical men will admit to have value--viz., money and life.

The direct loss to France caused by the Pebrine in seventeen years cannot be estimated at less than fifty millions sterling; and if we add to this what Redi's idea, in Pasteur's hands, has done for the wine-grower and for the vinegar-maker; and try to capitalise its value, we shall find that it will go a long way towards repairing; the money losses caused by the frightful and calamitous war of this autumn (1870). And as to the equivalent of Redi's thought in life, how can we overestimate the value of that knowledge of the nature of epidemic and epizootic diseases, and consequently of the means of checking, or eradicating them, the dawn of which has assuredly commenced?

Looking back no further than ten years, it is possible to select three (1863, 1864, and 1869) in which the total number of deaths from scarlet-fever alone amounted to ninety thousand. That is the return of killed, the maimed and disabled being left out of sight Why, it is to be hoped that the list of killed in the present bloodiest of all wars will not amount to more than this! But the facts which I have placed before you must leave the least sanguine without a doubt that the nature and the causes of this scourge will, one day, be as well understood as those of the Pebrine are now; and that the long-suffered massacre of our innocents will come to an end.

And thus mankind will have one more admonition that "the people perish for lack of knowledge"; and that the alleviation of the miseries, and the promotion of the welfare, of men must be sought, by those who will not lose their pains, in that diligent, patient, loving study of all the multitudinous aspects of Nature, the results of which constitute exact knowledge, or Science.