INFECTIVE AND CONTAGIOUS DISEASES. 27 
of more thorough sanitary inspection than now exists. We 
must hesitate to attribute to the disease a spontaneous origin 
from local conditions of food or from malaria. Pood is a most 
ready means of conveyance of contagium, and experiments 
prove that the disease occurs most readily when there are 
wounds in the mouth. The endemic prevalence of anthrax in 
pastures is attributed to persistence of the virus in earth, and it 
is possible that, at certain periods of the year, Bacilli in the soil 
have their powers of generating disease roused into activity. 
It has been suggested that the disease is due to certain plants, 
but none have been found capable of producing the symptoms of 
anthrax. It is thought that the spores may soak out from the 
carcases of buried animals and be taken up into plants, and thus 
conveyed into the alimentary canal; so it has been suggested to 
burn the carcases of anthrax patients, but Koch suggested bury¬ 
ing them so deep in The soil that the sun's warmth could not 
reach the spores. [These spores are very resistant, but it has 
been shown that their vitality is impaired by compressed oxygen, 
and that they are destroyed when heated up to a certain point.] 
Peser made a series of exhaustive experiments on this point in 
the Bavarian Alps. Ho interred the carcases of a series of ani¬ 
mals, inoculated and proved to be affected with anthrax. He 
placed them in various positions, and disinterred them at periods 
ranging from fourteen days to four months. He then made an 
elaborate examination of the tissues microscopically, and endea¬ 
voured to produce anthrax by inoculation, but in only one case 
with any result. In this a portion of a muscle of the quarter of 
a sheep, which had been buried fourteen days, was introduced 
into a horse which died in four days. It is known that 
anthrax material can be preserved by freezing and enclosure in 
capillary tubes. These experiments show that, under certain 
conditions, buried carcases do not serve as means of transmission 
of the disease. Vegetables, of various kinds, grown over the 
places where anthrax patients were buried, gave no result when 
used as food. - 
Messrs. Pasteur, Chamberland, and Koux, produced charbon by 
earth taken from around carcases, ten months after burial; it 
was found that earth from the superficial layers produced anthrax; 
from the deep layers—a peculiar form of septicaemia. Bacillus 
anthracis (Cohn) is isomorphous with the hay Bacillus. Tommasi 
and Klebs collected particles which had been floating in the air, 
and inoculation with them produced splenic disorder, the organisms 
found in the blood being somewhat similar to Bacillus anthracis. 
It is possible the disease thus produced was true malarial, fever but, 
according to another hypothesis, both anthrax and malarial fever 
result from the soil. [The lecturer here compared the diagrams 
