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His investigations of the diseases of beer and wine; of pebrine, a disease affecting silk-worms; of anthrax, and of fowl cholera, were of immense commercial importance and led to conclusions which have revolutionised physiology, pathology, and therapeutics.
There is not a single one of all the apparently capricious and unaccountable phenomena presented by the Pébrine, but has received its explanation from the fact that the disease is the result of the presence of the microscopic organism, Panhistophyton. Such being the facts with respect to the Pébrine, what are the indications as to the method of preventing it?
But the sacrifice has not been in vain. It is now certain that this devastating, cholera-like, Pébrine, is the effect of the growth and multiplication of the Panhistophyton in the silkworm.
Trouvelot lost all his worms by pebrine, the germs being imported in eggs received from Japan through M. Guérin-Méneville of Paris. Enough, however, was done to prove that silk raising can be carried on profitably, when due precautions are taken, as far north as Boston. As this moth extends to the tropics, it can be reared with greater facility southwards.
Throwing his massive head back against the purple velvet lining, he adjusted his steel-rimmed spectacles, joined his hands, and built a pyramid with his fingers; while he scrutinized her as coldly, as searchingly as Swammerdam or Leeuwenhoek might have inspected some new and as yet unclassified animalculum, or as Filippi or Pasteur studied the causes of "Pébrine." "What do you think of New York?"
Like those afflicting mankind, they arise from bad air, resulting from too close confinement, bad food, and other adverse causes. The most fatal and wide-spread disease, and one which since 1854 has threatened the extermination of silk worms in Europe, is the pebrine. It is due to the presence of minute vegetable corpuscles, which attack both the worms and the eggs.
But the facts which I have placed before you must leave the least sanguine without a doubt that the nature and the causes of this scourge will, one day, be as well understood as those of the Pébrine are now; and that the long-suffered massacre of our innocents will come to an end.
The direct loss to France caused by the Pébrine in seventeen years cannot be estimated at less than fifty millions sterling; and if we add to this what Redi's idea, in Pasteur's hands, has done for the wine-grower and for the vinegar-maker, and try to capitalise its value, we shall find that it will go a long way towards repairing the money losses caused by the frightful and calamitous war of this autumn.
Indeed, there is already strong evidence that some diseases of an extremely malignant and fatal character to which man is subject, are as much the work of minute organisms as is the Pébrine. I refer for this evidence to the very striking facts adduced by Professor Lister in his various well-known publications on the antiseptic method of treatment.
In reading the Report made by M. de Quatrefages in 1859, it is exceedingly interesting to observe that his elaborate study of the Pébrine forced the conviction upon his mind that, in its mode of occurrence and propagation, the disease of the silkworm is, in every respect, comparable to the cholera among mankind.
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