TRANSLATIONS FROM CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 241 
this space of time the appearance of Bacteria is very tardy; 
but from the moment they appear the animal has but a few 
hours to live. The longest time from the appearance of the 
Bacteria to the death of the inoculated animal, has been five 
hours. The mean duration of the incubation would thus be 
thirty-five hours. During this period of incubation the 
animal loses nothing of his strength and agility; it is only 
in the last two hours, and when the Bacteria exist in great 
numbers, that the rabbit ceases to eat and run about. It 
then remains lying down on its belly, becomes rapidly 
weaker, and dies without any remarkable phenomena. Some¬ 
times death is preceded by slight convulsions. 
The autopsy, performed directly after death, shows all the 
organs to be healthy; but the heart and the large blood- 
vessels~are always distended with clots of coagulated blood; 
the coagulation of the blood being the only apparent cause of 
death. The microscope gives during life some indication of 
this coagulation; in fact, from the time that the Bacteria 
multiply in a notable manner, the red globules seem to ac¬ 
quire a certain degree of viscosity, which causes them to 
agglutinate to one another in small clots. The organs con¬ 
tain Bacteria only in proportion to their vascularity. The 
spleen is the one of all others which contains the most, and 
these corpuscles are always in truly prodigious numbers 
This organ, though in appearance healthy, is, however, 
always a little more voluminous than in the normal state. 
It seems to be the actual form through the production of the 
Bacteria; but, no doubt, this is on account of its great vas¬ 
cularity. After the spleen comes the liver and the kidneys, 
then the lungs, the brain, the muscles, the glands, the gan¬ 
glions, and the lymphatics, which contain them only in the 
blood-vessels which course their tissues. Experience hav¬ 
ing demonstrated that the appearance of Bacteria in the 
blood precede those of morbid phenomena, it is natural to 
attribute the presence of these phenomena to the presence of 
Bacteria, which have a real existence, multiply, and propa¬ 
gate in the same manner as other beings that are endowed 
with life. So long as the blood only contains the germ, and 
their development is not effected, the morbid phenomena are 
not produced either. But on examining these questions, if 
we take another view, it is probable that the blood in which 
the Bacteria have not made their appearance might be inca¬ 
pable of producing them in another animal; that is to say, 
during the period of incubation the Bacteria could not 
be sown, so to speak, and the malady could not be communi¬ 
cated by inoculation. 
After having said that during the period of incubation, 
