154 Manual of Veterinary Microbiology. 



matters into the system. We now know, however, 

 that putrefaction is only a complex fermentation 

 tending to the degradation of organic matter, with 

 or without the production of fetid odor, a process 

 which necessitates the intervention of germs or mi- 

 crobes of various species. Hence we can not con- 

 ceive of septicaemia without microbes. 



But the r6le of the latter has not always the same 

 importance ; the germs, remaining intrenched outside 

 the tissues upon a wound, for example, act solely 

 through the soluble products (ptomaines and dias- 

 tases) to which their nutritive exchanges give origin, 

 and we then have to do with a kind of poisoning ; or, 

 the same germs, breaking the barrier which the liv- 

 ing tissues oppose to them, make their way into the 

 latter and multiply there; intoxication by toxines 

 then becomes complicated with troubles caused by 

 this proliferation. 



The first of the two contingencies which we have 

 just mentioned occurs under a multitude of condi- 

 tions. And, first of all, it is unquestionable that sep- 

 ticaemia sometimes can be produced without the pres- 

 ence of microbes. Koch has shown that five drops 

 of a putrefying fluid kills a mouse in a few hours, no 

 microbes then being found either in the blood or vis- 

 cera. The disease thus developed is a true intoxica- 

 tion by soluble microbic substances or ptomaines en- 

 gendered outside of the organism in the putrefying 

 fluid. It is to this species of septicaemia that we 

 must refer the intoxications which result in animals 

 and man from the consumption of imperfectly pre- 

 served foods in way of decomposition or already 

 decomposed ; such, for example, as the poisoning 



