SPONTANh: \Kli.\l ION. 



reference to tin? phenomena of in! disease, di>tin- 



guishittg argnn used on analogy -which, ho\\-ver, are 



tci-rib! . from those bam n. I 



should have liked t< follow up the account I h live already 

 u'lven* <.f the truly excellent researches of a young and an 

 unknown tin-man physician named Koch, on spi> 

 by an account of what Pasteur lias recently done with 

 !o the same subject. Here we have before us a 

 living concilium of the most deadly power, which we can 

 follow from the beginning to the end of its life cycle, f 

 We find it in the blood or spleen of a smitten animal in 

 the state say of short, motionless rods. When these rods 

 are placed in a nutritive liquid on the warm stage of the 

 microscope, we soon see them lengthening into filaments 

 which lie, in some cases, side by side, forming in < 

 graceful loops, or becoming coiled into knots of a com- 

 plexity not to be unraveled. We finally see those filaments 

 resolving themselves into innumerable spores, each with 

 death potentially housed within it, yet not to be distin- 

 guished microscopically from the harm less germs of llnrillus 

 V\. The bacterium of splenic fever is called Itarillux 

 . This formidable or^ani.-m was shown to me by 

 M. Pasteur in Paris last July. His recent investiga 

 regarding the part it plays pathologically certainly rank 

 among the most remarkable labors of that remarkable 

 man. Observer after observer had strayed and fallen 

 in this land of pitfalls, a multitude of opposing conclu- 

 sions and mutually destructive theories being the 

 result. In association with a younger physiological 

 colleague, .M. .Joubert. Pasteur struck in amid the 

 chaos, and soon reduced it to harmony. They \>\ 

 among other things, that in cases where previous observers 

 in France had Mippos.-d themselves to be dealing solely 

 with f.-\er. another equally virulent factor was 



simultaneously active. Splenic fever was often over- 

 led by septicji tn::t. and re.-ults due solely to the latter 

 had been frequently made the ground of pathological in- 

 ferences regarding the character and cause of the f> 



K'htljr Review, -70, see arti. I. K, r 



f Dmllinger and Drjadale bad previously shown what nkill and 

 H can accomplish, by their admirable otwenraiiona on the life 



ln-f..ry 



