46 Chapter III 



furnish the bacteria that developed on Brunner's plates. Neverthe- 

 less, even in the case of pathogenic organisms, which swarm in the 

 blood, the sweat is usually free from them. This has been shown by 

 Krikliwy 1 in the case of cats inoculated with anthrax whose sweat, 

 in spite of the passage of numerous bacteria into the circulation, 

 contained none. 



Micro-organisms, then, after their entrance into the refractory 

 animal, are not eliminated by any of the excretory channels which 

 serve for the elimination of many of the soluble poisons. It was 

 necessary therefore to seek some other process capable of affording 

 an explanation of the disappearance of the micro-organisms which so 

 often and by such varied means make their way into the interior of 

 a resistant organism. For it is a well-established fact that in these 

 cases the micro-organisms do disappear completely. This has been 

 observed so often that it is unnecessary to offer any demonstration of 

 the fact. Perhaps in the refractory organism the micro-organisms 

 undergo the fate of the foreign bodies which penetrate, or which are 

 introduced, into the circulation. It has long been known, thanks 

 especially to the work of Hoffmann and Recklinghausen 2 , and of 

 Ponfick 3 , that particles of carmine or vermilion when injected into 

 the blood are deposited in several organs. They are found in the 

 spleen, the lymphatic glands and the bone-marrow. A certain number 

 of these foreign particles may even be fixed in the liver and kidneys, 

 but, instead of passing into the bile and the urine, they remain 

 lodged in the interstitial tissue of the organs. The observers just 

 cited noted that the coloured granules do not remain long in either 

 the blood or the lymph but will be found in the interior of the 

 cellular elements. These granules persist for weeks without any 

 appreciable modification, differing in this from the micro-organisms 

 which, as a rule, after several days or even after a few hours, disappear 

 from the refractory organism. This disappearance might be more 

 justly compared to the resorption of corpuscular elements which 

 [50] results in a more or less complete atrophy. The facts concerning 

 the resorption of pus, of extravasated blood, of the mucosa of the 

 uterus in pregnancy, etc., have long been known, and it is among 

 these that one should seek analogies with the disappearance of the 

 micro-organisms. When bacteria of various species are injected into 



1 Vratch (in Russian), St Petersburg, 1896, Nos. 8, 12. 

 3 Centralblf. d. med. Wissensch., Berlin, 1867, No. 31. 

 8 Virchoufs Archiv, 1869, Bd. XLTIII, S. 1. 



