Newspaper Articles

This is a clipping from a newspaper.  “One Merry Christmas” was on one side and “Pasteur’s Attenuated Virus” was on the other side.  I wonder which article Grandma Lizzie was interested in.

One Side

The Other Side

ONE MERRY CHRISTMAS

 

As I sit by my cozy fire and read your pleasant letters to the accompaniment of the soft clickety click of my knitting needles, I am possessed by the desire to be one of you again after the hurry of the past few months.

 

My thoughts will stray toward the near Christmas tide; there are so many to plan some loving remembrance for and so little in our purses to draw upon.  I am always pleased to find suggestions in the FARMER for making gifts, and although to many of us on the farm the outlay for presents must be small, it is the spirit of kindliness and unselfishness that makes it a pleasant time to remember.

 

One of the merriest days that I recall, was a Christmas when everything looked gloomy enough in the morning.  To begin with we were feeling poorer than the proverbial church mouse, and had only a little to keep Christmas cheer with; then the bad roads prevented our going to the dear old home to meet the loved ones; and finally as the final straw, or “Johns” decided to spend the day in hunting, leaving sister and me to swallow our disappointment as best wee could.

 

For awhile we had a doleful time, then our better natures got uppermost and we said “Let’s have a Christmas anyway and make it a happy day for the children if we cannot be happy ourselves.”  So we robbed the big evergreen of some branches, and in a short time, the old log house was transformed into a Christmas bower and we were singing over the work as merry as girls, and the wee tots were fairly wild over the dolls, etc., that dangled from the green boughs of our impromptu tree.

 

A few extra touches to our dinner, and in came our hunters who plainly showed their pleasure and surprise to see the house brightened and happy, smiling faces instead of two injured-looking women sighing over what “might have been.”

 

Maybe we didn’t applaud our droll orator who made a speech for the occasion! May-

 

 

 

PASTEUR’S ATTENUATED VIRUS

 

Since the death of this great scientist and experimenter, the world has known more of his successful efforts in the cause of alleviating physical suffering, and warding off contagious disease.

 

The following, from the Nov. issue of Review of Reviews, will interest all dairymen and stock breeders:

 

“The secret of attenuation has thus become an open one to Pasteur.  He laid hold of the murderous virus of splenic fever, and succeeded in rendering it not only harmless to life, but a sure protection against the virus in its most concentrated form.  No man, in my opinion, can work at these subjects so rapidly a Pasteur without falling into errors of detail.  But this may occur while his main position remains impregnable.  Such a result, for example, as that obtained in the presence of so many witnesses at Melun, must remain an ever memorable conquest of science.  Having prepared his attenuated virus, and proved by laboratory experiments its efficacy as a protective vaccine, Pasteur accepted an invitation from the President of the Society of Agriculture at Melun to make a public experiment of what might be called an agricultural scale.  This act of Pasteur’s is, perhaps the boldest thing recorded in this book.  It naturally caused anxiety among his colleagues of the Academy, who feared that he had been rash in closing with the proposal of the President.

 

“But the experiment was made.  A flock of sheep was divided into two groups, the members of one group being all vaccinated with the attenuated virus, while those of the other group were left unvaccinated.  A number of cows were also subjected to a precisely similar treatment.  Fourteen days afterward, all the sheep and all the cows, vaccinated an unvaccinated, were inoculated with a virulent virus; and three days subsequently more than two hundred persons assembled to witness the result.  The ‘shout of admiration,’ mentioned by R. Radot, ‘was a natural outburst under the circumstances.  Of twenty-five sheep which had not been protected by vaccination, twenty-one were already dead, and the re-

 

 

 

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