1877—1879 51 



obscure and open to dispute when the cause of the phenomena 

 is not known; all is light when it is grasped." 



In a septic liquid exposed to the contact of air, vibriones die 

 and disappear; but, below the surface, in the depths of the 

 liquid (one centimetre of septic liquid may in this case be 

 called depths), "the vibriones are protected against the action 

 of oxygen by their brothers, who are dying above them, and 

 they continue for a time to multiply by division ; they after- 

 wards produce germs or spores, the filiform vibriones themselves 

 being gradually reabsorbed. Instead of a quantity of moving 

 threads, the length of which often extends beyond the field of 

 the microscope, nothing is seen but a dust of isolated, shiny 

 specks, sometimes surrounded by a sort of amorphous gangue 

 hardly visible. Here then is the septic dust, living the latent 

 life of germs, no longer fearing the destructive action of oxygen, 

 and we are now prepared to understand what seemed at first 

 so obscure : the sowing of septic dust into putrescible liquids 

 by the surrounding atmosphere, and the permanence of putrid 

 diseases on the surface of the earth." 



Pasteur continued from this to open a parenthesis on diseases 

 "transmissible, contagious, infectious, of which the cause 

 resides essentially and solely in the presence of microscopic 

 organisms. It is the proof that, for a certain number of 

 diseases, we must for ever abandon the ideas of spontaneous 

 virulence, of contagious and infectious elements suddenly pro- 

 duced within the bodies of men or of animals and originating 

 diseases afterwards propagated under identical shapes ; all those 

 opinions fatal to medical progress and which are engendered 

 by the gratuitous hypotheses of the spontaneous generation 

 of albuminoid-ferment materia, of hemiorganism, of arche- 

 biosis, and many other conceptions not founded on observa- 

 tion." 



Pasteur recommended the following experiment to surgeons. 

 After cutting a fissure into a leg of mutton, by means of a 

 bistoury, he introduced a drop of septic vibrio culture; the 

 vibrio immediately did its work. " The meat under those con- 

 ditions becomes quite gangrened, green on its surface, swollen 

 with gases, and is easily crushed into a disgusting, sanious 

 pulp." And addressing the surgeons present at the meeting : 

 " The water, the sponge, the charpie with which you wash or 

 dress a wound, lay on its surface germs which, as you see, have 

 an extreme facility of propagating within the tissues, and which 



T 



