M. PASTEUR'S EXPERIMENTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1899, 13 April 1888, Page 8

M. PASTEUR'S EXPERIMENTS.

(From Our London Correspondent.) London, February 22.

Last Friday M. Pasteur made a series of experiments in Paris before a number of scientific men in order to test the efficacy of his method of destroying rabbits without harming other animals except fowls. M. Pasteur was particularly anxious that Sir Francis Bell should be present to witness these experiments, but neither Sir Francis nor any other Agents-general were able to oblige him. Lady Cooper, however, was amongst the spectators. Sheep, fowls, and rabbits partook of the hay and cabbage leaves which had been saturated with the microbes of hen cholera, the sheep eating the poisoned food for the tenth time. The rabbits, after eating, soon became drowsy, took to their burrows and died, it is believed without pain. At the time of writing from Paris the fowls had not shown any signs of suffering, but it was exexpected that they would die in about three

days. The sheep coolly munched their poisoned hay, and were apparently none the' worse for it.

M. Pasteur has written to Sir Francis Bell, telling him that he was going to send out Drs Germond and Hinds and M. Lovito superintend a series of experiments in Australia, and that these gentlemen are expected to leave Paris tomorrow. He asked the Agent-general a series of questions with regard to the habits and so forth of the rabbits, the class of soil they burrowed in, the character of their burrows and various other particulars. Sir Francis replied to these queries in detail, and took occasion in his letter to point out that the great difficulty in the way of the adoption of M. Pasteur's plan would lie in the application of the remedy and the development of a contagious disease over hundreds of millions of acres. M. Pasteur was under the impression that all that the New South Wales Government could do was to call upon him to prove that his remedy was efficacious for the destruction of rabbits. The Agent-general told him that, although he was no doubt right in thinking that that was all the New South Wales Government would want from him, yet he would in all probability be required to show that his remedy was efficacious not only within enclosures, such as it had been tried in at Bheiras, bub also that it could be applied to and proved to be efficacious within very vast areas ; in other words, it would have to be demonstrated that the disease would propagate itself and act automatically. Then there would also arise the other question, If the disease propagated itself naturally and automatically, how could he prove that it would not extend itself in an equally automatic fashion mongst other animals ? To this M. Pasteur replied that he had already made experiments upon a vast number of other animals, and that as regards sheep he had demonstrated that after partaking of the microbes ten times in succession they had suffered no apparent injury. From this he drew the conclusion that, even though it might ultimately turn out that repeated eating of food poisoned with these microbes was detrimental to the sheep, yet for all practical purposes this would not militate against the efficacy of his remedy, because the rabbits died so quickly after one administration of the poison that a district would be cleared of rabbits long before the sheep had had an opportunity of eating the poisoned food oftan enough to do them harm.

At the last moment M. Pasteur was placed in a position of some doubt concerning the departure of his three assistants to Australia, owing to his having received information that the Minister of Mines in New South Wales had issued a proclamation specially prohibiting the introduction of disease amongst rabbits with a view to their extermination, inasmuch as it was considered advisable to wait and see the result of the experiments in this direction now being conducted in South Australia. Sir Francis Bell saw this notice and forwarded it to M. Pasteur, who was considerably put out thereby, as he interpreted it to mean that his assistants would be forbidcen to make the experiments for which they were going out. He telegraphed at once to Sir Daniel Cooper to know whether this was so, but received a reassuring reply to the effect that no difficulties would be placed in the way of his assistants making their proposed experiments.