"This average is appreciably higher than the average for _charbon_. But it must be noted that the mortality from _rouget_ among swine, before vaccination, was much higher than that from _charbon_ among sheep. It was about 20 per cent.; a certain number of reports speak of losses of 60 and even 80 per cent.: so that almost all the veterinary surgeons are loud in their praises of the new vaccination." The rest of M. Chamberland's paper is concerned with the defects, such as they are, of the vaccinations, and the need of absolute cleanliness in the making of them: which is somewhat difficult for this vast number of vaccinations of animals all over France, and in other parts of the world. The whole story of the discovery is told in M. Valléry-Radot's Life of Pasteur: and the whole story of _rouget_, in the same most fascinating book, vol. ii., p. 180. III TUBERCLE Before Laennec, tubercle had been taken for a degenerative change of the tissues, much like other forms of degeneration. It was Laennec who brought men to see that it is a disease of itself, different from anything else; and this great discovery of the specific nature of tubercle, and his invention of the stethoscope, place him almost level with Harvey. He founded the facts of tubercle, and on that foundation Villemin built. In 1865, Villemin communicated to the Académie des Sciences his discovery that tubercle is an infective disease; that he had produced it in rabbits, by inoculating them with tuberculous matter. _En voici les preuves_, he said. He appealed to these inoculations to prove his teaching:-- _La tuberculose est une affection spécifique. Sa cause réside dans un agent inoculable. L'inoculation se fait très-bien de l'homme au lapin. La tuberculose appartient donc à la classe des maladies virulentes._ It was no new thing to say, or to guess, that phthisis was or might be infective. So far back as 1500, Frascatorius had said that phthisis came "by the gliding of the corrupt and noisome humours of the patient into the lungs of a healthy man." Surely, if clinical experience could suffice, men would have made something out of this wisdom of Frascatorius. They made nothing of it; they waited three hundred years for Villemin to inoculate the rabbits, and then the thing was done--_En voici les preuves_. Three years later, Chauveau produced the disease in animals, not by inoculation, but by the admixture of tuberculous matter with their food. Then, as the work grew, there came a short period of uncertainty: different species of animals are so widely different in their susceptibility to the disease that the results of further inoculations seemed to go against Villemin; and it was not till 1880 that Cohnheim finally established Villemin's teaching, and even went beyond it, making inoculation the very proof of tubercle:--