262 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



This was a Paris veterinary surgeon, M. Signol. He had 

 written to the Academy of Sciences that it was enough that a 

 healthy animal should be felled, or rather asphyxiated, for its 

 blood, taken from the deeper veins, to become violently viru- 

 lent within sixteen hours. M. Signol thought he had seen 

 motionless bacteridia similar to the bacillus anthracis ; but those 

 bacteridia, he said, were incapable of multiplying in the inocu- 

 lated animals. Yet the blood was so very virulent that animals 

 rapidly succumbed in a manner analogous to death by splenic 

 fever. A Commission was nominated to ascertain the facts; 

 Pasteur was made a member of it, as was also his colleague 

 Bouillaud — still so quick and alert, in spite of his eighty years, 

 that he looked less like an old man than like a wrinkled young 

 man — and another colleague, twenty years younger, Bouley, 

 the first veterinar^^ surgeon in France who had a seat at the 

 Institute. The latter was a tall, handsome man, with a some- 

 what military appearance, and an expression of energetic good 

 humour which his disposition fully justified. He was eager to 

 help in the propagation of new ideas and discoveries, and soon, 

 with eager enthusiasm, placed his marked talents as a writer 

 and orator at Pasteur's disposal. 



On the day when the Commission met, M. Signol showed 

 the carcase of a horse, which he had sacrificed for this experi- 

 ment, having asphyxiated it when in excellent health. Pasteur 

 uncovered the deep veins of the horse and showed to Bouley, and 

 also to Messrs. Joubert and Chamberland, a long vibrio, so 

 translucid as to be almost invisible, creeping, flexible, and 

 which, according to Pasteur's comparison, slipped between the 

 globules of the blood as a serpent slips between high grasses; 

 it was the septic vibrio. From the peritoneum, where it 

 swarms, that vibrio passes into the blood a few hours after 

 death ; it represents the vanguard of the vibriones of putrefac- 

 tion. When Jaillard and Leplat had asked for blood infected 

 with anthrax, they had received blood which was at the same 

 time septic. It was septicaemia (so prompt in its action that 

 inoculated rabbits or sheep perish in twenty-four or thirty-six 

 hours) that had killed Jaillard and Leplat 's rabbits. It was 

 also septicaemia, provoked by this vibrio (or its germs, for it 

 too has germs), that M. Signol had unknowingly inoculated 

 into the animals upon which he experimented. Successive 

 cultures of that septic vibrio enabled Pasteur to show, as he 

 had done for the bac^ll^:is anthracis, that one drop of those cul 



