the year. The result to the country is enormously increased revenues from this source, and as an indirect outcome the people are enjoying the advantages of free technical education, through the county councils, the funds for which, amounting to over 700,000l. a year, are provided by the Government out of the surplus duty on beer and spirits.

Again, we hear no more about the silkworm disease, which fiveand-twenty years ago threatened to devastate the lands of the golden cocoon, until Pasteur was induced to take the matter up, and, after two years of arduous study, discovered the remedy now universally applied. But it never occurs to us to think why silk is so abundant and so cheap.

Let our minds wander to those cruel battlefields which afflict us to think of, and the comforting thought comes to our relief that even the most severely wounded have now a chance of life they never had before. If we push our reflections a little further we shall find this is due to the knowledge of those lurking principles of death' which has sprung from the laboratories of other nations. True, it was Lister who first grasped the principle and applied the remedy to surgery, but the knowledge of the living cause of disease originated abroad, and, as I have already said, was elaborated by Lister on foreign soil.

When our Government officials, postmen and policemen, and people generally, are bitten by mad dogs, we thankfully send them to Paris to be inoculated with the anti-rabic virus at the expense of the Pasteur Institute. A fund at the Mansion House exists for this purpose, but we have never contributed as other nations have to the erection, endowment, or expenses of that great school.

In Australia it was Pasteur's assistants who discovered the Cumberland disease to be the same as anthrax, and who have established the protective vaccine in that country.

At this moment Yersin and Haffkine are succeeding in inoculating the people of our Indian Empire against the plague with their defensive serum, and Germany has sent a scientific commission, consisting of her most distinguished men, to Bombay to study the disease. Our illustrated papers, without the slightest jealousy, have depicted the group established in a well-appointed laboratory.

To Pasteur we owe the inestimable knowledge of what a ferment means, not only within the brewer's vat, but within the blood and tissues of men and animals. What was dead to us before now lives, what was unseen is now visible, what was intangible can now be dealt with. The result is that these studies, having already conquered new worlds, open up vistas of endless worlds yet to conquer. But are we doomed to leave all these possible conquests to other nations for ever? or has the time come when we can hope to join the great brotherhood, and work shoulder to shoulder in the cause of humanity?

Let us survey the land of our birth and see what our prospects are towards this scientific unity of nations.

Through the energy of some of our leading men, what is known as the British School of Preventive Medicine was established in London a few years ago. People pass the door every day on their way to the British Museum, but there is nothing to distinguish it from the ordinary houses in the street. Yet within this very ordinary house lies that which has the power to save mothers from the lifelong agony of seeing their children die of diphtheria, and also that which may save husbands from the misery of seeing their young wives sacrificed to certain forms of puerperal fever, while all the research is going on which is necessary to accomplish these ends. We are getting accustomed to hear of serums, and we shall soon take it as a matter of course that we can send round to the nearest chemist for a bottle of antitoxin for this complaint or that; but it is not within the power of the uninformed mind to conceive the nature of the work required to produce such remedies.

In connection with this ordinary-looking house, there is what the director is pleased to call a 'farm' a few miles out of town; but the farm is a villa residence on the roadside, with a little paddock at the back where structures have been erected for the necessary horses, and the laboratory. In the first place it is interesting to observe that the farm is kept in the most perfect sanitary condition, and that the horses are all tested for glanders with an antitoxin called mallein, and for tuberculosis with tuberculin, before they are subjected to the treatment necessary to make them immune against other diseases. This testing, and the preparation of the tests, involve the most advanced scientific knowledge, and is what the French Government expects of us before sending the animals they have bought into France. In the farm laboratory, which is under the charge of Dr. Bullock and an assistant, you may see diphtheria growing visibly before your eyes. In the flask containing it is a little soup, which was quite clear yesterday before it was inoculated with a trace of diphtheria culture taken from another flask. Now it is clouded, and on the surface a morbid growth is settling, painfully resembling the growth that may be seen in the throat of a patient suffering from that cruel disease. This particular specimen of the diphtheria bacillus had gone through hundreds of generations, passing from flask to flask, without losing any of its virulence. Two years before it had been taken from the throat of a child in Norway, sent to the Pasteur Institute, and from there passed on to us. The culture is grown for seven or ten days in the flask at a temperature of 37° C. It is then filtered through a Chamberland filter and its strength tested.

The horses, which are well fed and kept in excellent condition, are now inoculated with small and gradually increasing doses of this

active diphtheria poison, until they are rendered perfectly immune. During this process they seem more bent on the bits of sugar they are getting than disturbed by the prick of the syringe. At first the temperature slightly rises, but after twenty-four hours all symptoms are gone. After three, four, or five months the maximum antitoxicity is reached. A little of the blood of the horse is now drawn into a glass flagon, carefully protected from the possibility of inimical germs reaching it. The red constituents of the blood fall to the bottom of the flagon, leaving a clear fluid above; this is the anti-toxic serum, the antidote for the poison. But it is not completed yet, for it has to be tested to see that its value comes up to the standard which has been established by the German Government. This done, a number of very small blue bottles are withdrawn from the sterilising chamber and filled with the precious fluid, every bottle being labelled and marked with the strength of the dose. They are then forwarded to the laboratory in Great Russell Street, and are ready for the hospitals and for use in private practice.

This work is of such paramount importance that all the scientific men engaged in it are agreed as to the necessity for Government jurisdiction in the preparation of serums. That coming to our country from some quarters is frequently found to be below the accepted standard, hence likely to fail at the critical moment.

The method I have just described applies equally to the tetanus serum, only the process is slower, owing to the horse being more susceptible to this disease.

To prepare an antitoxin for the treatment of septic diseases, living cultures of the micro-organism known as the Streptococcus pyogenes are used. The maximum of virulence is obtained by passage from rabbit to rabbit, and the serum is used for erysipelas, some forms of puerperal fever, blood poisoning, &c. Both in France and in this country good results have followed the treatment in puerperal fever.

Thanks to the goodwill of a humane individual, Mr. Berridge by name, who left a large sum of money to be devoted to the spread of sanitary knowledge, a portion of this benefaction has afforded the means for carrying out this work for the last few years, in a small way, pending the erection of a more suitable building. A site for this has been found on the Thames Embankment, and there the structure may now be seen. It is proposed that this should be a school of hygiene as well as a school of preventive medicine, but it is not considered either desirable or necessary to carry on anti-rabic inoculations here, owing to the easy proximity of Paris. People, however, would be able to have the question definitely decided in this laboratory as to whether the dog was really mad that bit them. This is a point at once affecting the happiness and the purse of those who are bitten. It is known that dogs suffer from symptoms simu

lating those of rabies; and formerly, when human beings were bitten, it was impossible in some cases to determine whether the dog had been suffering from rabies or not. We are indebted to Pasteur for the only trustworthy test which can be applied; and we are now in a position, when a human being is bitten by a dog supposed to be, but not really, rabid, to remove all cause for anxiety, which would otherwise remain for months or even years.' 1 All that is required is to have the dog killed and the head sent to the research laboratory, where a rabbit would at once be inoculated with a portion of the brain. The death or life of the rabbit in a few days would settle the question of going over to Paris for the anti-rabic treatment or resting in peace at home. With a test laboratory in India many of the people now sent on to Paris in anxiety and haste might be spared a long and costly journey. Again, instead of our Government vaccine station occupying the ground floor of a poor house, in a poor street, it would be better to annex it to this new School of Preventive Medicine, with a suitable subsidy from the Government. Here also questions affecting not only the health of human beings and animals, but the industrial and agricultural prosperity of the people, will be scientifically studied, and brought to a practical conclusion. It further holds out a prospect that animals intended for breeding purposes in our own and other countries may be tested at home, and this with serums or vaccines sent forth from our own central laboratory made by the experts of our own country. If this can only be done in a large national way, and certificates of health after testing could ensure sound meat at the market-place, and wholesome milk in our homes, the boon to the community would be quite as great as vaccination against smallpox is at present. It is due to the Berridge fund that a start has now been made, and it is hoped that enlightened public opinion will enable it to go on.

At the end of the nineteenth century it is deplorable to think that as a nation we are still much in the same position with regard to this branch of science as that in which Sir Isaac Newton found himself when he said, 'I have been but a child playing on the seashore, now finding some pebble rather more agreeably variegated than another, while the immense ocean of Truth extends itself unexplored before me.'

1 Crookshank's Bacteriology.

ELIZA PRIESTLEY,

LIFE IN POETRY: POETICAL DECADENCE1

In my last two lectures 2 I traced the conditions under which Poetry comes into existence in the mind of the poet, and the manner in which it clothes itself with external form. I showed that it was the product of the harmonious fusion of two contrary elements, the Universal and the Individual. By the Universal element I mean what we often call by the name Nature: whatever is furnished naturally to the poet's conception by forces outside himself; the sources of inspiration springing from the religion, tradition, civilisation, education of the country to which he belongs; the general mental atmosphere of the age in which he lives; the common law of the language in which he composes. By the Individual element I mean what we usually call Art; including all that is contributed by the genius of the poet, and that helps to constitute the characteristic form or mould in which the universal idea is expressed.

I shall in my present lecture go further, and try to pursue the course of Life in Poetry in the history of the art, because the Art of Poetry has a life of its own, exactly analogous to the life of individual men and of States, proceeding from infancy to maturity and from maturity to decay. Great poetry of any kind is, as a rule, produced within certain well-defined periods of a nation's history, and the culminating point in every such kind of poetry is reached by a gradual ascent to the work of some great representative or classic poet. When this point has been reached we generally find an equally regular course of declension, represented by poets not without genius, but whose work is always characterised by certain common defects, which denote the exhaustion of the art and give warning of its approaching end. In the Greek epic, for example, Homer, representing the zenith of the art, has for his successors the literary composers of the Alexandrian period; and these again have their epigoni in poets like the Pseudo-Musæus. In the history of the Attic drama, the movement of decline begins almost insensibly with Euripides, but proceeds with increasing speed in the days of Agathon and other tragedians, whose names Time has not cared to preserve. The

A lecture delivered in the University of Oxford on the 6th of March, 1897. 2 Published in the Nineteenth Century for August 1896 and February 1897.