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and made his way unhurriedly to the front of the stately old
auditorium, where poor Dr. Fuerst was reading his lecture. I blush
to imagine the scene!-which was most embarrassing, yet so
amusing, that members of the audience who soon forgot what it was,
the distinguished gentleman from Boston was presenting, on that
afternoon, remembered all their lives the contretemps betwixt man
and bulldog, in Dickinson Hall! For, as the fierce-brow'd creature
approached the foot of the podium, he began most conspicuously to
growl; and the lecturer, glancing up, failed at first to see who, or
what, was making the sinister noise: which had the immediate
consequence, of causing a ripple of laughter to flow through the
assemblage. Again the dog growled; and, yet again, the hapless Dr.
Fuerst, now grown pallid and strained, cast his eye about, with no
luck. At last, the bulldog growling more stridently, Dr. Fuerst leaned
over the podium, to gaze down o'er the tops of his glasses, and,
seeing the creature, cried out for help, with a most comical
expression of terror. [Did the credulous gentleman fear a
rabid attack
from such a friendly source, all wondered! Indeed, it was vastly
entertaining,-and did not fail to stir laughter in even those
administrators present, amongst them Dr. Patton himself.]
After some minutes of confusion, which had the felicitous
effect, of awaking all who dozed in the warm hall, the proctors
restored order; and the abashed undergraduate hurried forward, to
take hold of his canine friend by the collar, and lead him away, whilst
all the undergraduates in the room cheered and stamped their feet,
and one reckless lad shouted out a request for a "locomotive
salute,-to the dog," which, I am relieved to say, was not pursued.)
The next incidence of rabies in a black specimen was not,
unfortunately, for some months, which caused the Foundation no
little frustration; and, when a case was reported, and brought to the
Foundation's attention, it was already too late,-for the impetuous
rabies team, at Massachusetts General, reached the child first. (As
to whether this small victim,-being a girl of but five years of age,
bitten severely by a rat-survived the sequence of potent shots, Dr.
Fuerst neglected to mention.) There then followed an initially
promising instance, later in the year, involving a young black man
in his twenties, bitten upward of a dozen times in the face and
throat, by a maddened fox, in a wooded area in Hartford,
Connecticut: this victim, the Foundation acquired with com–
mendable alacrity, and placed in "polio" quarantine in Cambridge,
