its ravages confine themselves to the animal world,
for during the time and in the district referred to, five hundred and
twenty-eight human beings perished in the agonies of the same disease.

A description of the fever will help you to come to a right decision
on the point which I wish to submit to your consideration. 'An
animal,' says Dr. Burdon Sanderson, 'which perhaps for the previous
day has declined food and shown signs of general disturbance, begins
to shudder and to have twitches of the muscles of the back, and soon
after becomes weak and listless. In the meantime the respiration
becomes frequent and often difficult, and the temperature rises three
or four degrees above the normal; but soon convulsions, affecting
chiefly the muscles of the back and loins, usher in the final collapse
of which the progress is marked by the loss of all power of moving the
trunk or extremities, diminution of temperature, mucous and
sanguinolent alvine evacuations, and similar discharges from the mouth
and nose.' In a single district of Russia, as above remarked,
fifty-six thousand horses, cows, and sheep, and five hundred and
twenty-eight men and women, perished in this way during a period of
two or three years. What the annual fatality is throughout Europe I
have no means of knowing. Doubtless it must be very great. The
question, then, which I wish to submit to your judgment is this: Is
the knowledge which reveals to us the nature, and which assures the
extirpation, of a disorder so virulent and so vile, worth the price
paid for it? It is exceedingly important that assemblies like the
present should see clearly the issues at stake in such questions as
this, and that the properly informed sense of the community should
temper, if not restrain, the rashness of those who, meaning to be
tender, become agents of cruelty by the imposition of short-sighted
restrictions upon physiological investigations. It is a modern
instance of zeal for God, but not according to knowledge, the excesses
of which must be corrected by an instructed public opinion.

*****

And now let us cast a backward glance on the field we have traversed,
and try to extract from our labours such further profit as they can
yield. For more than two thousand years the attraction of light
bodies by amber was the sum of human knowledge regarding electricity,
and for more than two thousand years fermentation was effected without
any knowledge of its cause. In sci