w 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. And as to the equivalent
of Redi's thought in life, how can we over-estimate 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 result