272 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



made a first successful application of those principles to medi« 

 cine in 1863.'' 



Pasteur himself, elected to the Academic des Science as a 

 mineralogist, proved by the concatenation of his studies within 

 the last thirty years that Science was indeed one and all em- 

 bracing. Having thus called his audience's attention to the 

 bonds which connect one scientific subject with another, 

 Pasteur proceeded to show the connection between his yester- 

 day's researches on the etiology of Charbon to those he now 

 pursued on septicaemia. He hastily glanced back on his suc- 

 cessful cultures of the bacillus anthracis, and on the certain, 

 indisputable proof that the last culture acted equally with the 

 first in producing charbon within the body of animals. He 

 then owned to the failure, at first, of a similar method of cul- 

 tivating the septic vibrio: *'A11 our first experiments failed in 

 spite of the variety of culture media that we used ; beer-yeast 

 water, meat broth, etc., etc. . . .'* 



He then expounded, in the most masterly manner: (1) the ' 

 idea which had occurred to him that this vibrio might be an 

 «xclusively anaerobic organism, and that the sterility of the 

 liquids might proceed from the fact that the vibrio was killed by 

 the oxygen held in a state of solution by those liquids; (2) the 

 similarity offered by analogous facts in connection with the 

 vibrio of butyric fermentation, which not only lives without 

 mr, but is killed by air; (3) the attempts made to cultivate the 

 septic vibrio in a vacuum or in the presence of carbonic acid 

 j>as, and the success of both those attempts; and, finally, as 

 the result of the foregoing, the proof obtained that the action 

 of the air kills the septic vibriones, which are then seen to 

 perish, under the shape of moving threads, and ultimately to 

 disappear, as if burnt away by oxygen. 



'*If it is terrifying," said Pasteur, "to think that life may 

 be at the mercy of the multiplication of those infinitesimally 

 small creatures, it is also consoling to hope that Science will 

 not always remain powerless before such enemies, since it is 

 already now able to inform us that the simple contact of air is 

 sometimes sufficient to destroy them. But," he continued, 

 meeting his hearers' possible arguments, *'if oxygen destroj'S 

 vibriones, how can septicemia exist, as it does, in the constant 

 presence of atmospheric air? How can those facts be recon- 

 ciled with the germ theory? How can blood exposed to air 

 become septic through the dusts contained in air? All is dark, 



