268 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



culture which he had promised him, begged that he would 

 kindly bring him in exchange a hen suffering from that disease, 

 since it could contract it so easily. 



Pasteur told the story of this episode in March , 1878 ; it was 

 an amusing interlude in the midst of those technical discus- 

 sions. " At the end of the week, I saw M. Colin coming into 

 my laboratory, and, even before I shook hands with him, I said 

 to him : ' Why, you have not brought me that diseased hen? ' 

 'Trust me,' answered M. Colin, 'you shall have it next 

 week.' I left for the vacation; on my return, and at the first 

 meeting of the Academy which I attended, I went to M. Colin 

 and said, ' Well, where is my dying hen?' 'I have only just 

 begun experimenting again,' said M. Colin ; ' in a few days I 

 will bring you a hen suffering from charbon.' Days and weeks 

 went by, with fresh insistence on my part and new promises 

 from M. Colin. One day, about two months ago, M. Colin 

 owned to me that he had been mistaken, and that it was impos- 

 sible to give anthrax to a hen. ' Well, my dear colleague,' I 

 said to him , ' I will show you that it is possible to give anthrax 

 to hens ; in fact , I will one day myself bring you at Alfort a 

 hen which shall die of charbon.' 



" I have told the Academy this story of the hen M. Colin had 

 promised in order to show that our colleague's contradiction of 

 our observations on charbon had never been very serious." 



Colin, after speaking about several other things, ended by 

 saying : " I regret that I have not until now been able to hand 

 to M. Pasteur a hen dying or dead of anthrax. The two that 

 I had bought for that purpose were inoculated several times 

 with very active blood, but neither of them has fallen ill. 

 Perhaps the experiment might have succeeded afterwards, but, 

 one fine day, a greedy dog prevented that by eating up the two 

 birds, whose cage had probably been badly closed." On the 

 Tuesday which followed this incident, the passers-by were 

 somewhat surprised to see Pasteur emerging from the Ecole 

 Normale, carrying a cage, within which were three hens, one 

 of them dead. Thus laden, he took a fiacre, and drove to the 

 Academic de Medecine, where, on arriving, he deposited this 

 unexpected object on the desk. He explained that the dead 

 hen had been inoculated with charbon two days before, at 

 twelve o'clock on the Sunday, with five drops of yeast water 

 employed as a nutritive liquid for pure bacteridium germs, and 



