276 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



nected with Delafond's name. In 1863, Delafond had collected 

 some blood infected with charbon, and, at a time when such 

 experiments had hardly been thought of, he had attempted 

 some experiments on the development of the bacteridium, under 

 a watch glass, at the normal blood temperature. He had seen 

 the little rods grow into filaments, and compared them to a 

 *'very remarkable mycelium." ''I have vainly tried to see 

 the mechanism of fructification," added Delafond, "but I hope 

 I still may." Death struck down Delafond before he could 

 continue his work. 



In 1869 a scientific congress was held at Chartres; one of 

 the questions examined being this: *'What has been done to 

 oppose splenic fever in sheep?" A veterinary surgeon enume- 

 rated the causes which contributed, according to him, to pro- 

 duce and augment mortality by splenic fever: bad hygienic 

 conditions; tainted food, musty or cryptogamized ; heated and 

 vitiated air in the crowded pens, full of putrid manure ; paludie 

 miasma or effluvia; damp soil flooded by storms, etc., etc. A 

 well-known veterinary surgeon, M. Boutet, saw no other means 

 to preserve what remained of a stricken flock but to take it to 

 another soil, which, in contradiction with his colleague, he 

 thought should be chosen cool and damp. No conclusion could 

 be drawn. The disastrous loss caused by splenic fever in the 

 Beauce alone was terrible; it was said to have reached 

 20,000,000 francs in some particularly bad years. The migra- 

 tion of the tainted flock seemed the only remedy, but it was 

 difficult in practice and offered danger to other flocks, as car- 

 cases of dead sheep were wont to mark the road that had been 

 followed. 



Pasteur, starting from the fact that the charbon disease is 

 produced by the bacteridium, proposed to prove that, in a 

 department like that of Eure et Loir, the disease maintained 

 itself by itself. "When an animal dies of splenic fever in a 

 field, it is frequently buried in the very spot where it fell; 

 thus a focus of contagion is created, due to the anthrax spores 

 mixed with the earth where other flocks are brought to graze* 

 Those germs, thought Pasteur, are probably like the germs of 

 the flachery vibrio, which survive from one year to another 

 and transmit the disease. He proposed to study the disease 

 on the spot. 



It almost always happened that, when he was most anxious 

 to give himself up entirely to the study of a problem, some 



