198 * ANTHRAX. 



amount of this is said to bear a relation to the protection 

 afforded. 



It will be seen that the greatest care is required in obtaining 

 the proper stage of attenuation of the virus, and that in un- 

 skilful hands it may become a source of grievous loss and 

 annoyance, while in the hands of the skilled the benefits we 

 may expect from it, having regard to report of results from 

 abroad, are almost incalculable. In the hands of Pasteur and 

 others, knowledge of these facts — the attenuation of the virus, 

 and the effect of the inoculation of this modified poison — has 

 been found of great practical use, and has been applied by the 

 former to vast numbers of animals, especially sheep, among 

 which anthrax is more prevalent in France and Germany than 

 among other species. 



From the foregoing facts the following deductions suggest 

 themselves to us as having a more practical bearing: 1st. That 

 spores are a phase of the life-history of the bacillus ; 2nd. That 

 these spores are in a high degree capable of producing the 

 disease ; 3rd. That these spores resist extremes of temperature, 

 desiccation, and other chcumstances which are fatal to the 

 rods ; 4th. That much of the doubt which arose respecting 

 the part played by bacteria in the earlier study of the disease 

 was due to the fact that spores were not then recognised in 

 their development — and as filaments could not be detected in 

 the blood at all times, the organism was not deemed essential ; 

 5th. That the boiling-point is fatal to the spores and rods ; 

 6th. That inoculation with cultivated virus is said to afford a 

 certain amount of protection from the naturally or artificially 

 produced disease. 



Symptoms of Anthrax. 

 Generic Symptoms.— Although anthrax, both in the different 

 species of animals in which we meet with it, and the several mani- 

 festations of the disease in the same species, has in these several 

 manifestations, both in origin and development, much that distin- 

 guishes the one from the other, there are yet certain generic or 

 class features characteristic of the disease which stamp these 

 several forms as merely forms, and not separate or distinctive 

 diseases. The disease itself differs less in the symptoms which 

 are exhibited in the different animals than in its different forms 

 in the same animal. 



