Furious criticism, unbelief, and flagrant misstatement of facts began at once, and lasted more than two years. Of Pasteur's opponents, the chief was M. Peter, who besought the Académie des Sciences, about once a week, that they should close Pasteur's laboratory, because he was not preventing hydrophobia but producing it. The value of M. Peter's judgment may be estimated by what he had said, a few years earlier, about bacteriology in general--"I do not much believe in that invasion of parasites which threatens us like an eleventh plague of Egypt. After so many laborious researches, nothing will be changed in medicine, there will only be a few more microbes. M. Pasteur's excuse is that he is a chemist, who has tried, out of a wish to be useful, to reform medicine, to which he is a complete stranger." But it does not matter what was said twenty years ago. In England, the Report of the 1886 Committee, and the Mansion House meeting in July 1889, mark the decline and fall of all intelligent opposition to the work. Among so many thousand cases, during so many years, it would be a miracle indeed if not a single case had failed or gone amiss; but we are concerned here with the thousands. Take, to begin with, four reports from Athens, Palermo, Rio, and Paris. It is to be noted that the patients, alike at Paris and at other Institutes, are divided into three classes:-- "A. Bitten by animals proved to have been rabid by the development of rabies in other animals inoculated from them. "B. Bitten by animals proved to have been rabid by dissection of their bodies by veterinary surgeons. "C. Bitten by animals suspected to have been rabid." It is to be noted also, as a fact proved beyond doubt, that the full benefit of the treatment is not obtained at once; the highest degree of immunity is reached about a fortnight after the discontinuance of the treatment. Those few cases, therefore, where hydrophobia has occurred, not only in spite of treatment, but within a fortnight of the last day of treatment, are counted as cases where the treatment came too late.