Four hours after his death, the mucus from the palate of the child was collected. It was diluted with a little water, and two rabbits were inoculated under the skin of the abdomen. The rabbits perished in less than thirty-six hours. The saliva of these dead rabbits also transmitted the disease to fresh rabbits. Did it not seem as if one had got hold of an inoculation of hydrophobia? Such was in fact the conclusion of Dr. Maurice Raynaud, who, having been informed, at the same time as Pasteur, of the illness of the child, had made, on his own account, some experiments on rabbits. His rabbits were dead. Already a year previously M. Maurice Raynaud had announced the transmission, by the saliva, of rabies from man to rabbits. 'We are, then, in the presence of a new fact of this kind,' he said, 'and we really believe, until a proof to the contrary is given us, that these latter rabbits died of hydrophobia.' With his habitual prudence, and trusting more to the results of experiment than to medical observation alone, Pasteur was not in a hurry to form such positive conclusions. He began by doing what Dr. Maurice Raynaud had neglected to do. He examined with the microscope the tissues and the blood of the rabbits inoculated in the laboratory; he discovered, both in those that were dead, and in those which were on the point of death, the presence of a special microbe, easily cultivable in a pure state and of which the successive cultures caused the death of other rabbits. Invariably, the same microbe appeared in the blood. As one or two days sufficed to cause death, hydrophobia could not have had time to make its appearance. Pasteur, moreover, found this same microbe in the saliva of children who had died of common maladies, and even in the normal saliva of healthy adults. It was a new microbe, causing a disease unknown up to that time. To Pasteur it seemed, in the case of the experiments made with the mucus from the child's palate, to be simply an accompaniment of the rabic virus. * * * * *