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virus—right into their brains—a business that killed an ordinary dog one hundred times out of one hundred?
Then one day Roux bored little holes through the skulls of two vaccinated dogs—and two not vaccinated ones: and into all four went a heavy dose of the most virulent virus. . . .
One month later, Pasteur and his men, at the end of three years of work, knew that victory over hydrophobia was in their hands. For, while the two vaccinated dogs romped and sniffed about their cages with never a sign of anything ailing them the two that had not received the fourteen protective doses of dried rabbit's brain—these two had howled their last howls and died of rabies.
Now immediately—the life-saver in this man was always downing the mere searcher—Pasteur's head buzzed with plans to wipe hydrophobia from the earth, he had a hundred foolish projects, and he walked in a brown world of thought, in a mist of plans that Roux and Chamberland, and not even Madame Pasteur could penetrate. It was 1884, and when Pasteur forgot their wedding anniversary, the long-suffering lady wrote to her daughter:
"Your father is absorbed in his thoughts, talks little, sleeps little, rises at dawn, and, in one word, continues the life I began with him this day thirty-five years ago."
At first Pasteur thought of shooting his weakened rabies virus into all the dogs of France in one stupendous Napoleonic series of injections: "We must remember that no human being is ever attacked with rabies except after being bitten by a rabid dog. . . . Now if we wipe it out of dogs with our vaccine . . ." he suggested to the famous veterinarian, Nocard, who laughed, and shook his head.
"There are more than a hundred thousand dogs and hounds and puppies in the city of Paris alone," Nocard told him, "and more than two million, five hundred thousand dogs in all of France—and if each of these brutes had to get fourteen shots of your vaccine fourteen days in a row . . . where would you get the men? Where would you get the time? Where the