A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



of controversy. That a microscopic vegetable could 

 cause a virulent systemic disease was an idea altogether 

 too startling to be accepted in a day, and the generality 

 of biologists and physicians demanded more convincing 

 proofs than Devaine as yet was able to offer. 



Naturally a host of other investigators all over the 

 world entered the field. Foremost among these was 

 the German Dr. Robert Koch, who soon corroborated 

 all that Devaine had observed, and carried the experi- 

 ments further in the direction of the cultivation of suc- 

 cessive generations of the bacteria in artificial media, 

 inoculations being made from such pure cultures of the 

 eighth generation, with the astonishing result that 

 animals thus inoculated succumbed to the disease. 



Such experiments seem demonstrative, yet the world 

 was unconvinced, and in 1876, while the controversy 

 was still at its height, Pasteur was prevailed upon to 

 take the matter in hand. The great chemist was be- 

 coming more and more exclusively a biologist as the 

 years passed, and in recent years his famous studies of 

 the silk-worm diseases, which he proved due to bac- 

 terial infection, and of the question of spontaneous 

 generation, had given him unequalled resources in 

 microscopical technique. And so when, with the aid 

 of his laboratory associates Duclaux and Chamberland 

 and Roux, he took up the mooted anthrax question 

 the scientific world awaited the issue with bated breath. 

 And when, in 1877, Pasteur was ready to report on his 

 studies of anthrax, he came forward with such a wealth 

 of demonstrative experiments experiments the rigid 

 accuracy of which no one would for a moment think of 

 questioning going to prove the bacterial origin of 



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