He was endeavouring to evade that difficulty; the idea pursued him that human medicine might avail itself of “the long period of incubation of hydrophobia, by attempting to establish, during that interval before the appearance of the first rabic symptoms, a refractory condition in the subjects bitten.”
At the beginning of the year 1884, J. B. Dumas enjoyed following from a distance Pasteur’s readings at the Académie des Sciences. His failing health and advancing age (he was more than eighty years old) had forced him to spend the winter in the South of France. On January 26, 1884, he wrote to Pasteur for the last time, à propos of a book[32] which was a short summary of Pasteur’s discoveries and their concatenation:
“Dear colleague and friend,—I have read with a great and sincere emotion the picture of your scientific life drawn by a faithful and loving hand.
“Myself a witness and a sincere admirer of your happy efforts, your fruitful genius and your imperturbable method, I consider it a great service rendered to Science, that the accurate and complete whole should be put before the eyes of young people.
“It will make a wholesome impression on the public in general; to young scientists, it will be an initiation, and to those who, like me, have passed the age of labour it will bring happy memories of youthful enthusiasm.
“May Providence long spare you to France, and maintain in you that admirable equilibrium between the mind that observes, the genius that conceives, and the hand that executes with a perfection unknown until now.”
This was a last proof of Dumas’ affection for Pasteur. Although his life was now fast drawing to its close, his mental faculties were in no wise impaired, for we find him three weeks later, on February 20, using his influence as Permanent Secretary of the Academy to obtain the Lacaze prize for M. Cailletet, the inventor of the well-known apparatus for the liquefaction of gases.
J. B. Dumas died on April 11, 1884. Pasteur was then about to start for Edinburgh on the occasion of the tercentenary of the celebrated Scotch University. The “Institut de France,” invited to take part in these celebrations, had selected representatives from each of the five Academies: the Académie Française was sending M. Caro; the Academy of Sciences, Pasteur and de Lesseps; the Academy of Moral Sciences, M. Gréard; the Academy of Inscriptions and Letters, M. Perrot; and the Academy of Fine Arts, M. Eugène Guillaume. The Collège de France sent M. Guillaume Guizot, and the Academy of Medicine Dr. Henry Gueneau de Mussy.
Pasteur much wished to relinquish this official journey; the idea that he would not be able to follow to the grave the incomparable teacher of his youth, the counsellor and confidant of his life, was infinitely painful to him.
He was however reconciled to it by one of his colleagues, M. Mézières, who was going to Edinburgh on behalf of the Minister of Public Instruction, and who pointed out to him that the best way of honouring Dumas’ memory lay in remembering Dumas’ chief object in life—the interests of France. Pasteur went, hoping that he would have an opportunity of speaking of Dumas to the Edinburgh students.