by Pasteur into the nature and mode of cure of that most dreadful of
maladies, hydrophobia. The value of his discovery was greater than
could be estimated by its present utility, for it showed that it might
be possible to avert other diseases besides hydrophobia by the
adoption of a somewhat similar method of investigation and of
treatment.

Here it might seem as if we had outstepped the boundaries of
chemistry, and had to do with phenomena purely vital. But recent
research indicated that this was not the case, and pointed to the
conclusion that the microscopist must again give way to the chemist,
and that it was by chemical rather than biological investigation that
the causes of diseases would be discovered, and the power of removing
them obtained. For we learned that the symptoms of infective diseases
were no more due to the microbes which constituted the infection than
alcoholic intoxication was produced by the yeast cell, but that these
symptoms were due to the presence of definite chemical compounds, the
result of the life of these microscopic organisms. So it was to the
action of these poisonous substances formed during the life of the
organism, rather than to that of the organism itself, that the special
characteristics of the disease were to be traced, for it had been
shown that the disease could be communicated by such poisons in the
entire absence of living organisms.

Had time permitted, he would have wished to have illustrated the
dependence of industrial success upon original investigation, and to
have pointed out the prodigious strides which chemical industry in
this country had made during the fifty years of her Majesty's reign.
As it was, he must be content to remark how much our modern life, both
in its artistic and useful aspects, owed to chemistry, and therefore