1877—1879 53 



those redoubtable microscopic foes gave Pasteur a fever for 

 work, a thirst for new research, and an immense hope. But 

 once again he constrained himself, refrained from throwing 

 himself into varied studies, and, continuing what he had begun, 

 reverted to his studies on splenic fever. 



The neighbourhood of Chartres being most afflicted, the 

 Minister of Agriculture, anticipating the wish of the Conseil 

 General of the department of Eure et Loir, had entrusted 

 Pasteur with the mission of studying the causes of so-called 

 spontaneous charbon, that which bursts out unexpectedly in a 

 flock, and of seeking for curative and preventive means of 

 opposing the evil. Thirty-six years earlier, the learned 

 veterinary surgeon, Delafond, had been sent to seek, particu- 

 larly in the Beauce country, the causes of the charbon disease. 

 Bouley, a great reader, said that there was no contrast more 

 instructive than that which could be seen between the reason- 

 ing method followed by Delafond and the experimental method 

 practised by Pasteur. It was in 1842 that Delafond received 

 from M. Cunin Gridaine, then Minister of Agriculture, the mis- 

 sion of "going to study that malady on the spot, to seek for 

 its causes, and to examine particularly whether those causes 

 did not reside in the mode of culture in use in that part of the 

 country." Delafond arrived in the Beauce, and, having seen 

 that the disease struck the strongest sheep, it occurred to him 

 that it came from ' ' an excess of blood circulating in the 

 vessels." He concluded from that that there might be a cor- 

 relation between the rich blood of the Beauce sheep and the 

 rich nitrogenous pasture of their food. 



He therefore advised the cultivators to diminish the daily 

 ration ; and he was encouraged in his views by noting that 

 the frequency of the disease diminished in poor, damp, or 

 sandy soils. 



Bouley, in order to show up Delafond's efforts to make facts 

 accord with his reasoning, added that to explain "a disease, 

 of which the essence is general plethora, becoming contagious 

 and expressing itself by charbon symptoms in man," Delafond 

 had imagined that the atmosphere of the pens, into which the 

 animals were crowded, was laden with evil gases and putrefying 

 emanations which produced an alteration of the blood ' ' due at 

 the same time to a slow asphyxia and to the introduction 

 through the lungs of septic elements into the blood." 



It would have been but justice to recall other researches con- 



T 2 



