THE SEPTIC VIBRIO 259 



This one, immediately: This organism is a common 

 one. The disease which it causes is identical with 

 that which Signol had produced, two years before, by 

 inoculating with blood taken from the deep-lying veins 

 of a healthy animal, asphyxiated 15 or 20 hours. In 

 this case the bacteria reach the blood by way of the 

 intestinal canal which often contains millions of them, 

 but where they are harmless. Only after death do they 

 pass the barrier which this canal opposes to them, and 

 reach the organs and the blood. 



It was the same bacterium that was present in Leplat 

 and Jaillard's putrid anthrax blood: as the disease which 

 it causes develops more rapidly than anthrax, it gets 

 the better of the latter in the animals which have been 

 inoculated with this blood and we see it alone. Davaine, 

 therefore, was right. The animals which Leplat and 

 Jaillard inoculated did not die of anthrax, and it was 

 left for Pasteur to tell what killed them. 



Finally, it was probably this same organism which 

 caused the illusion of P. Bert. The blood in which he 

 beheved that he had killed the bacteridia with oxygen, 

 and which gave anthrax without microbes when inocu- 

 lated, very probably contained Signol's organism pro- 

 tected by its spore stage against the action of oxygen, 

 and bringing to the inoculated animal the disease of 

 which it is the agent. ^ 



Thus disappeared with one wave of the wand the 

 greatest of the objections to the new etiology of anthrax. 

 But this was not all. Pasteur made haste to subject 

 the new bacterium, which he has made famous under 

 the name of septic vibrio, to that physiological study 



1 This disease, common to man and various domestic animals, is known 

 variously to-day as gangrenous septicemia, malignant oedema, traumatic 

 gangrene, gaseous gangrene, etc. It is believed to be due to various 

 distinct anaerobes called Vibrion sepiique, Bacillus osdematicus, Bacillus 

 welchii, Bacillus egens, etc. Trs. 



