292 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



under a full light & propos of that discussion on puerperal 

 fever I 



But Pasteur was supported and inspired during that period, 

 perhaps the most fruitful of his existence, by the prescience 

 that those notions meant the salvation of human lives , and that 

 mothers need no longer be torn by death from the cradle of 

 their new-born infants. 



"I sh v ill force them to see; they will have to see!" he 

 repeated vith a holy wrath against doctors who continued to 

 talk, from their study or at their clubs, with some scepticism , of 

 those newly discovered little creatures , of those ultra-microscopic 

 parasites, trying to moderate enthusiasm and even confidence. 



An experimental fact which occurred about that time was 

 followed with interest, not only by the Academic des Sciences, 

 but by the general public, whose attention was beginning to be 

 awakened. A professor at the Nancy Faculty, M. Feltz, had 

 announced to the Acade'mie des Sciences in March, 1879, that, 

 in the blood abstracted from a woman, who had died at the 

 Nancy Hospital of puerperal fever, he had found motionless 

 filaments, simple or articulated, transparent, straight or curved, 

 which belonged, he said, to the genus leptothrix. Pasteur, 

 who in his studies on puerperal fever had seen nothing of the 

 kind, wrote to, Dr. Feltz, asking him to send him a few drops 

 of that infected blood. After receiving and examining the 

 sample, Pasteur hastened to inform M. Feltz that that lepto- 

 thrix was no other than the bacillus anthracis. M. Feltz, 

 much surprised and perplexed, declared himself ready to own 

 his error and to proclaim it if he were convinced by examining 

 blood infected by charbon , and which , he said , he should collect 

 wherever he could find it. Pasteur desired to save him that 

 trouble, and offered to send him three little guinea-pigs alive, 

 but inoculated, the one with the deceased woman's blood, the 

 other with the bacteridia of charbon-infected blood from 

 Chartres, the third with some charbon-infected blood from a 

 Jura cow. 



The three rodents were inoculated on May 12, at three o'clock 

 in the afternoon, and arrived, living, at Nancy, on the morning 

 of the thirteenth. They died on the fourteenth, in the labora- 

 tory of M. Feltz, who was thus able to observe them with par- 

 ticular attention until their death. 



''After carefully examining the blood of the three animals 

 after their death, I was unable," said M. Feltz, " to detect the 



