CHAPTER X 



1880—1882 



A NEW microbe now became the object of the same st-adies 

 of culture and inoculation as the bacillus anthracis. Readers 

 of this book may have had occasion to witness the disasters 

 caused in a farmyard by a strange and sudden epidemic. 

 Hens, believed to be good sitters, are found dead on their nests. 

 Others, surrounded by their brood, allow the chicks to leave 

 them, giving them no attention; they stand motionless in the 

 centre of the yard, staggering under a deadly drowsiness. A 

 young and superb cock, whose triumphant voice was yesterdaj^ 

 heard by all the neighbours, falls into a sudden agony, his beak 

 closed, his eyes dim, his purple comb drooping limply. Other 

 chickens, respited till the next day, come near the dying and 

 the dead, picking here and there grains soiled with excreta con- 

 taining the deadly germs: it is chicken cholera. 



An Alsatian veterinary surgeon of the name of Moritz had 

 been the first to notice, in 1869, some *' granulations'* in the 

 corpses of animals struck down by this lightning disease, which 

 sometimes kills as many as ninety chickens out of a hundred, 

 those who survive having probably recovered from a slight 

 attack of the cholera. Nine years after Moritz, Perroncito, an 

 Italian veterinary surgeon, made a sketch of the microbe, 

 which has the appearance of little specks. Toussaint studied 

 it, and demonstrated that this microbe was indeed the. cause of 

 virulence in the blood. He sent to Pasteur the head of a cock 

 that had died of cholera. The first thing to do, after isolating 

 the microbe, was to try successive cultures; Toussaint had 

 used neutralized urine. This, though perfect for the culture of 

 the bacillus anthracis, proved a bad culture medium for the 

 microbe of chicken cholera ; its multiplication soon became 

 arrested. If sown in a small flask of yeast water, equally fav« 



