THE MICROBES OF HUMAN DISEASES. 201 
development of the microbe. Bochefontaine also 
injected the choleraie virus under the skin of his arm, 
but the operation was only followed by an cedematous 
redness, localized round the puncture, and the con- 
stitutional symptoms were not so marked as those 
produced by taking the same virus into the digestive 
canal. 
Ferran’s Attempts at Inoculation—This leads us 
to mention the attempts at inoculation made by 
Ferran on a large scale in Spain, under the name of 
anti-cholera vaccinations. 
In 1884, Ferran, a Tortosa physician, was sent by 
the municipality of Barcelona to study the infectious 
agent of cholera at Toulon. His preceding studies 
in micrography pointed him out for this mission. 
He returned from Toulon, provided with cultures of 
the comma bacillus, and devoted himself to the 
study of its life-history. The facts reported by him 
differ very much from those previously observed, and 
cannot be accepted without further investigation. 
According to Ferran, the cholera microbe presents 
a polymorphism which has escaped notice in Koch’s 
investigations, and those of the other micrographists 
who have observed and cultivated it. When trans- 
ferred to a sterilized alkaline infusion, the comma 
bacillus increases in length, forms sinuous filaments, 
then swells at one extremity until it attains to the 
volume of a red blood-corpuscle, thus constituting 
an oogonium filled with protoplasm. A transparent 
10 
