258 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



pin prick or a scratch is sufficient to inoculate shepherds, 

 butchers, knackers or farmers with the malignant pustule. 



Though a professor at the Alfort Veterinary School, M. 

 Delafond, did point out to his pupils as far back as 1838 that 

 charbon blood contained ''little rods,'' as he called them; it 

 was only looked upon by himself and them as a curiosity with 

 no scientific importance. Davaine, when he — and Rayer as 

 well — recognized in 1850 those little filiform bodies in the blood 

 of animals dying of splenic fever, he too merely mentioned 

 the fact, which seemed to him of so little moment that he did 

 not even report it in the first notice of his works edited by 

 himself. 



It was only eleven years later that Davaine — struck, as he 

 himself gladly acknowledged, by reading Pasteur's paper on 

 the butyric ferment, the little cylindrical rods of which offer all 

 the characteristics of vibriones or bacteria — asked himself 

 whether the filiform corpuscles seen in the blood of the charbon 

 victims might not act after the manner of ferments and be the 

 cause of the disease. In 1863, a medical man at Dourdan, 

 whose neighbour, a farmer, had lost twelve sheep of charbon in 

 a week, sent blood from one of these sheep to Davaine, who 

 hastened to inoculate some rabbits with this blood. He recog* 

 nized the presence of those little transparent and motionless rods 

 «ivhich he called bacteridia (a diminutive of bacterium, or rod- 

 shaped vibriones). It might be thought that the cause of the 

 evil was found, in other words that the relation between those 

 bacteridia and the disease which had caused death could not be 

 doubted. But two professors of the Val de Grace, Jaillard and 

 Leplat, refuted these experiments. 



They had procured, in the middle of the summer, from a 

 knacker's yard near Chartres, a little blood from a cow which 

 had died of anthrax, and they inoculated some rabbits with it. 

 The rabbits died, but without presenting any bacteridia. Jail- 

 lard and Leplat therefore affirmed that splenic fever was not 

 an affection caused by parasites, that the bact^ridium was an 

 epiphenomenon of the disease and could not be looked upon 

 as the cause of it. 



Davaine, on repeating Jaillard and Leplat 's experiments, 

 found a new interpretation ; he alleged that the disease they had 

 inoculated was not anthrax. Then Jaillard and Leplat ob- 

 tained a little diseased sheep's blood from M. Boutet, a 

 veterinary surgeon at Chartres, and tried that instead of «ow's 



