Oxford Democrat

LOUIS PASTEUR.
HYDROPHOBIA SPECIALIST.

At the present time more printer's ink is being used to detail the doings of Pasteur, of Paris, than of, perhaps, any body else in the world. He is a great man in his own city, listened to with reverence by the learned people who assemble afternoons in the celebrated Lyon d'Or, on the Rue du Helder, the restaurant in which the leading minds of the French capital assemble for social intercourse. The French Government affords him liberal facilities for experiments and the treatment of patients. Pasteur now has many people under his treatment, the results of which are generally gratifying. He employs a surgeon to inoculate according to instructions received from him, the law of France not permitting him to operate, as he is neither a physician nor surgeon.

Pasteur experimented five years before he announced that he had discovered a mode of preventing hydrophobia in human beings, but more than a year previously he had given to the world the statement that he was able to prevent it in animals bitten by rabid creatures.

The learned Frenchman, whose alleged discovery is the wonder of the times, is about sixty years of age, a native of Dôle, in the Jura. His parents were of humble origin, and poor. When his father, an old soldier, decorated on the field of battle, returned to France, he took up the trade of tanner, and was obliged to work very hard to keep the wolf from the door. Nevertheless, he found time every evening to superintend the lessons of his son, who at an early age, was sent to college and of whom he was determined to make an educated man. The boy, however, was no infant prodigy: and it is reported of him that he did not always take the shortest road either to or from school. He was fonder of drawing than anything else, and whenever he could escape from his books, would amuse himself by taking portraits of his neighbors. As a boy he furnished an exception to the rule: "The child is father of the man."

In due time, however, the passion for work, afterward so imperative, was born within him. He studied at Besançon, and there received the degree of bachelor-of-letters. Immediately he was appointed tutor in the same college, and in the intervals of his duties he followed the course of mathematics necessary to prepare him for the scientific examinations of the Ecole Normale. He is now one of the most learned chemists in the French capital.