246 BACTERIA IN INFECTIOUS DISEASES. 



immunity against the disease anthrax. The writer 

 long since proposed to himself to make the experi- 

 ment, but has not yet been able to do so. The 

 matter is mentioned here in the hope that some 

 one more favorably situated for pursuing experi- 

 mental work will consider it of sufficient impor- 

 tance to induce him to test it in the manner 

 indicated. In the meantime I take the liberty of 

 quoting, from a paper published in 1881, certain 

 extracts in which my reasons are given for doubt- 

 ing the correctness of the hypothesis of Pasteur, 

 and in which another explanation is offered : 



" Let us see where this hypothesis leads us. In the 

 first place, \ve must have a material of small-pox, and a 

 material of measles, and a material of scarlet fever, etc., 

 etc. Then we must admit that each of these different 

 materials has been formed in the system and stored up 

 for these emergencies, attacks of the diseases in ques- 

 tion, for we can scarcely conceive that they were all 

 packed away in the germ-cell of the mother and the 

 sperm-cell of the father of each susceptible individual. 

 If, then, these peculiar materials have been formed and 

 stored up during the development of the individual, 

 how are we to account for the fact that no new produc- 

 tion takes place after an attack of any one of the dis- 

 eases in question ? 



"Again, how shall we account for the fact that the 

 amount of material which would nourish the small-pox 

 germ, to the extent of producing a case of confluent 

 small-pox may be exhausted by the action of the atten- 

 uated virus (germ) introduced by vaccination ? Pas- 

 teur's comparison of a fowl protected by inoculation 

 with the microbe of fowl-cholera, with a culture-fluid in 



