Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

It is not only rabbits which undergo this operation. Guinea-pigs, chickens, mice and rats are used in quantities. In the laboratory of autopsy there are to be seen aquariums filled with the dainty axolotl of Mexico, glasses of odd fish, even cages of birds.

In another room an experimenter is dissecting a rabbit which has died of rabies, and from whose spinal cord he expects to get material for vaccinal virus.

In a small dark room, whose temperature is never allowed to vary, which is never swept nor dusted for fear of arousing tranquil microbes, and whose door is never opened except when absolutely necessary, are arranged rows of drying bottles, in which hang bits of the marrow. These bottles are marked with the degree of violence of the rabies from which the animal died, and with the date when the marrow was put up to dry.

Here, attendants are preparing the veal broth and the gelatines in which the infected marrows will be cultivated.

Thus as one goes from room to room he can follow the whole method of successive cultures, that method which is "the key-stone of the arch, and without which there could be no vigorous demonstration of the Pasteur method."

On every hand one sees the interesting "ways of doing things" which characterize the Institute. Here, the cleaning of jars, syringes and tubes is going on; not a simple washing and drying. In the Pasteur household articles are sterilized as well as cleaned--that is, burned in the flames of a spirit lamp, or in an oven. There, a man is blowing bulbs, droll balloon pipettes, all the multitude of glass contrivances the laboratories demand. Here, under a microscope, an investigator has the diphtheria pest, an inoffensive speck; there, another has in his field a whole colony of lively little straight and bent sticks; it is a company of Doctor Koch's cholera microbes.

Wherever one goes in the building there is a busy intentness, an absorption, an absolute blindness to everything but the work in hand, be it the contents of a culture tube, or the film on a microscope slide. One can easily believe of these workers the story told of M. Pasteur himself, that he had to be hunted up on his wedding morning and pulled away from his microscope, in order to be got into his dress-coat and gloves in time for the ceremony.

Evidently, too, they have not forgotten the words their master spoke on the day of the inauguration of the Institute:

"All the enthusiasm you have had since the beginning, my dear co-laborers, I beg of you to keep; but give it, as an inseparable companion, a severe control. Announce nothing that you cannot prove in a simple, decisive fashion.

"Cultivate the critical spirit. Left to itself it neither awakens ideas nor stimulates to great deeds, but without it all is lost."

As one goes from room to room, and talks with one and another of the busy, courteous savants, he realizes finally that it is here that Pasteur the scientist is to be found. The labors that made the great savant famous are all summed up here. Here his methods are at work, here is his spirit alive in the men who have best comprehended him, and whom he has been able most deeply to inspire. It is a great thing to achieve. It is a greater thing to inspire others to achieve. Louis Pasteur has done both.

STRANGER THAN FICTION.

HUGH BRONTE'S COURTSHIP. THE ELOPEMENT OF HUGH BRONTE AND ALICE MCCLORY.

Unpublished Chapters from "The Brontes in Ireland."

BY DOCTOR WILLIAM WRIGHT.

NOTE.--"The Brontes in Ireland" will be issued in book form by D.
Appleton & Co., after the serial publication is concluded in
MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE.