236 PASTEUR : THE HISTORY OF A MIND 



powerful and colossal life which animates a horse or 

 an ox, threatened and destroyed by this miserable little 

 rod which we can see only under a microscope? This rod 

 appears, moreover, only some hours before death, and 

 when the animal is already very ill. Where is it and 

 what has it been doing earlier? You tell us, you who 

 believe in it, that it does not long survive the animal 

 which it has killed, and dies when the tissues decay. 

 But all animals dead of anthrax decay, for we bury 

 them quickly without making any use of them. And, 

 therefore, how do you explain that there are epidemics of 

 anthrax every year, epidemics which appear in the summer 

 after having disappeared from the country all winter? 

 How do you explain, also, that there are in Beauce 

 cursed fields, in Auvergne dangerous mountains, where 

 animals from the farm can neither be pastured nor 

 driven, without paying a tribute, more or less great, 

 to the disease? From this is it not evident that the 

 disease is attached to the soil, to the vegetation, and to 

 certain climatic conditions, which have nothing to do 

 with this bacteridium in the blood of diseased animals? 

 "All that we are able to grant you," the skeptics 

 might have added, "in the presence of your proofs and 

 of your experiments, is that this bacteridium is an 

 epiphenomenon. It sometimes accompanies the virus, 

 or follows it, but it is not the virus itself. The virus 

 of anthrax, like that of smallpox, or of sheeppox, is 

 something which one can handle without seeing it and 

 recognizing it. It exists, since the disease is inoculable, 

 but we do not see it outside of the animal. It is not 

 something independent of the animal but a modality of 

 its being. It is living, it may be granted you, but it 

 borrows its life from the being which carries it, it is 

 nothing outside of the animal, and we recognize it only 

 in transit through living beings." 



