394 
M. ARLOING. 
danger, but it is impossible to rely on that for the destruction 
of the virulence. In fact, to obtain this result, all the virulent 
particles would require to be heated to over yo° C. for half- 
an-hour. But in practice this temperature is not always uni¬ 
formly attained and maintained throughout the whole thick¬ 
ness of the masses of flesh submitted to the cooking. Let us 
add, to complete the information on the role that may be at¬ 
tributed to cooking, that in sixty-two experiments in which 
Johne administered notoriously tuberculous flesh, after hav¬ 
ing submitted it to cooking in boiling water for ten to fifteen 
minutes, 35.5 per cent, of the animals were infected. 
Experiments by inoculation of the juice of the meat, in 
which one, so to speak, compels the virus to enter the organ¬ 
ism, may appear to some persons a little artificial. 
The results, however, which they furnish are less alarm¬ 
ing than those of the experiments in which the suspected flesh 
has been introduced naturally into the digestive passages. 
Sometimes, indeed, the results are almost reassuring. Thus, 
M. Nocard has obtained only a single example of infection in 
twenty-one series of inoculations made with the juice of the 
flesh of twenty-one cows seized in the abattoirs. But it must 
not be forgotten-that the virulent bacilli are distributed with 
great irregularity in the muscular mass, that they are rare 
there, and that consequently they may pretty often be absent 
from the small volume of juice which serves for the inocula¬ 
tion of an animal. To appreciate the virulence of the juice of 
the flesh by inoculation, it is therefore necessary, as in statis¬ 
tics, to examine as many experiments as possible. 
Last year, at the Congress for the Study of Tuberculosis, 
the experiments of MM. Nocard, Chauveau and Arloing, 
Galtier, Peuch and Veyssiere were cited. These experiments 
give a total of forty-seven attempts, nine of which were fol¬ 
lowed by tuberculization. 
For these forty-seven attempts there were employed one 
hundred and thirty-seven animals, thirteen of which became 
tuberculous, giving a proportion of 9.4 per cent, for infection 
by inoculation ; while by taking the mean of the experiments 
by Gerlach and Johne by natural ingestion one arrives at the 
ratio of 17.8 per cent. 
