THE CURATIVE POISON 125 



medium with a culture from which he had elim- 

 inated the bacterides by means of filtering it 

 through plaster, and the resulting liquid failed 

 to produce anthrax. 



Pursuing his studies further, he demon- 

 strated that Messrs. Gaillard and Leplat, who 

 asserted that they had produced anthrax in ani- 

 mals by means of blood which contained no 

 bacterides, had been mistaken, and that what 

 they had really done was to produce a different 

 disease by inoculating with a new species of 

 microbe, which he named the septic vibrion. 

 In like manner he refuted Paul Bert, who, after 

 having destroyed the bacteria of anthrax by 

 means of compressed oxygen, claimed that the 

 blood thus deprived of them could nevertheless 

 cause anthrax; Pasteur showed that this blood 

 still contained the germs or spores of bacter- 

 ides, which had greater resistant powers than 

 the bacterides themselves, and that it was from 

 them that these cases of anthrax came, so that 

 in any case it was caused either by the bac- 

 terides or by their spores. This amounted to a 



