1877—1879 43 



notice, read by yourself, last Monday, at the Academie dea 

 Sciences. 



"Let me tell you frankly that you have not sufficiently 

 imbibed the teaching contained in the papers I have read, in 

 my own name and in that of M. Joubert, at the Academie des 

 Sciences and at the Academy of Medicine. Can you believe 

 that I should have read those papers if they had wanted the 

 confirmation you mention, or if M. Colin's contradictions could 

 have touched them? You know what my situation is, in these 

 grave controversies ; you know that, ignorant as I am of medical 

 and veterinary knowledge, I should immediately be taxed with 

 presumption if I had the boldness to speak without being 

 armed for struggle and for victory ! All of you, physicians and 

 veterinary surgeons, would quite reasonably fall upon me if I 

 brought into your debates a mere semblance of proof. 



'How is it that you have not noticed that M. Colin has 

 travestied — I should even say suppressed — because it hindered 

 his theory, the important experiment of the successive cul- 

 tures of the bacteridium in urine? 



"If a drop of blood, infected with anthrax, is mixed with 

 water, with pure blood or with humour from the eye, as was 

 done by Davaine, Koch and M. Colin himself, and some of 

 that mixture is inoculated and death ensues, doubt may remain 

 in the mind as to the cause of virulence, especially since 

 Davaine's well-known experiments on septicaemia. Our ex- 

 periment is very different ..." 



And Pasteur showed how, from one artificial culture to 

 another, he reached the fiftieth, the hundredth, and how a 

 drop of this hundredth culture, identical with the first, could 

 bring about death as certainly as a drop of infected blood. 



Months passed, and — as Pasteur used to wish in his youth 

 that it might be — few passed without showing one step for- 

 ward. In a private letter to his old Arbois school-fellow, Jules 

 Vercel, he wrote (February 11, 1878) : " I am extremely busy ; 

 at no epoch of my scientific life have I worked so hard or been 

 bo much interested in the results of my researches, which will, 

 I hope, throw a new and a great light on certain very important 

 branches of medicine and of surgery." 



In the face of those successive discoveries, every one had a 

 word to say. This accumulation of facts was looked down upon 

 by that category of people who borrow assurance from a mix- 



