278 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



The Academy decided that the necropsy and miscroscopic 

 examination of the dead hen which Pasteur was to bring to 

 Colin should take place in the presence of a Commission com- 

 posed of Pasteur, Colin, Davaine, Bouley, and Vulpian. This 

 Commission met on the following Saturday, July 20, in the 

 Council Chamber of the Academy of Medicine. M. Armand 

 Moreau, a member of the Academy, joined the five members 

 present, partly out of curiosity, and partly because he bad 

 special reasons for wishing to speak to Pasteur after the 

 meeting. 



Three hens were lying on the table, all of them dead. The 

 first one had been inoculated under the thorax with five drops 

 of yeast water slightly alkalized, which had been given as a 

 nutritive medium to some bacteridia anthracis; the hen 

 had been placed in a bath at 25 C., and had died within 

 twenty -two hours. The second one, inoculated with ten drops 

 of a culture liquid, had been placed in a warmer bath, 30 C., 

 and had died in thirty-six hours. The third hen, also 

 inoculated and immersed, had died in forty -six hours. 



Besides those three dead hens, there was a living one which 

 had been inoculated in the same way as the first hen. This 

 one had remained for forty-three hours with one-third of its 

 body immersed in a barrel of water. When it was seen in the 

 laboratory that its temperature had gone down to 36 C., that 

 it was incapable of eating and seemed very ill, it was taken out 

 of the tub that very Saturday morning, and warmed in a stove 

 at 42 C. It was now getting better, though still weak, and 

 gave signs of an excellent appetite before leaving the Academy 

 council chamber. 



The third hen, which had been inoculated with ten drops, 

 was dissected then and there. Bouley, after noting a serous 

 infiltration at the inoculation focus, showed to the judges 

 sitting in this room, thus suddenly turned into a testing labora- 

 tory, numerous bacteridia scattered throughout every part of 

 the hen. 



"After those ascertained results," wrote Bouley, who drew 

 up the report, " M. Colin declared that it was useless to pro- 

 ceed to the necropsy of the two other hens, that which had just 

 been made leaving no doubt of the presence of bacilli anthracis 

 in the blood of a hen inoculated with charbon and then placed 

 under the conditions designated by M. Pasteur as making 

 inoculation efficacious. 



