lo THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



This was a Paris veterinary Burgeon, M. Signol. He had 

 written to t!. ly of Sciences that it was enough that a 



healthy animal should he felled, or rather asphyxiated, for 

 blood, tab rn the deeper veins, to become violently viru- 



lent within sixteen hours. M. Signol thought he had b< 

 motionless bacteridia similar to the bacillus anthracis ; but those 



teridia, he Baid, wi re incapable of multiplying in the inocu- 

 lated animals. Vet the blood was so very virulent that animals 



idly succumbed in a manner analogous to death by splenic 



er. A Commission was nominated to ascertain the facts ; 



9tenr was made a member of it, as wa9 also his colleag 

 Bouillaud— still so quick and alert, in spite of his eighty ye.: 

 that he looked less like an old man than like a wrinkled young 

 man— and another colleague, twenty years younger, Bouley, 

 the fir rinary surgeon in France who had a seat at the 



Institute. The latter was a tall, handsome man, with a some- 

 what military appearance, and an expression of energetic good 

 humour which his disposition fully justified. He was eager to 

 help in the propagation of new ideas and discoveries, and soon, 

 with eager enthusiasm, placed his marked talents as a writer 

 and orator at Pasteur's disposal. 



On the day when the Commission met, M. Signol showed 

 the car >f a horse, which he had sacrificed for this experi- 



ment, having asphyxiated it when in excellent health. Pasteur 

 uncovered the deep veins of the horse and showed to Bouley, and 

 ;.lso to Messrs. Joubcrt and Chamberland. a long vibrio, so 



nslucid as to be almost invisible, creeping, flexible, and 

 which, according to Pasteur's comparison, slipped between the 

 globules of the blood as a serpent slips between high grasses ; 

 it was the septic vibrio. From the peritoneum, where it 

 swarms, that vibrio passes into the blood a few hours after 



•h; it represents the vanguard of the vibrionea of putrefac- 

 tion. When .1 ullard and Lepl.it had asked for blood infected 

 with anthrax, they had received blood which was at the same 

 time' septic. It was septicemia (so prompt in its action that 

 inoculated rabbits or sheep perish in twenty-four or thirty-six 

 huiirs* that had killed Jaillard and Leplat's rabbits. It was 

 also septicemia, pi ivoked by this vibrio <or its germs, for it 

 t i has germs), that M. Signol had unknowingly inoculated 

 into the animals upon which he experimented. Successive 

 cultures of that septic vibrio enabled Pasteur to show, as he 

 had done for the bacillus anthracis. that one drop of those cul- 



