790 
SCIENTIFIC SECRESY. 
knowledge acquired, means of investigation and observation, 
methods, procedures, or discoveries. Physicians formed in 
our schools admit no other secret than professional secresy 
in all that relates to our art. If you discover a remedy, your 
duty is to divulge it, without troubling yourself as to whom 
will accrue the honour and profit of your labours and your 
anxieties ; and if you discover a means which may be useful 
in prophylaxis, your duty is still the same in the presence 
of similar risks. The physician, and he glories in it, knows, 
when the occasion arrives, how to close his eyes to his 
personal interests. As Professor Beclard so well says in his 
eloge on Andral, 'he has the habit, the passion, of silent 
sacrificed 
“ Quite opposite to all this are the principles which pre¬ 
vail in manufactures and the applied sciences. The inventor 
is invested with an exclusive transitory right, which is pro¬ 
tected by the law. For years he may appropriate to himself 
the fruit of his investigations as a legitimate property. Here 
secresy is quite natural. The points of view are entirely 
different, according to the situation. Our medium is pecu¬ 
liarly our own, and even in its most immediate vicinity things 
are looked upon differently than by ourselves. This was 
evidently the case at the Academy.” 
Since the above was in type, M. Toussaint telegraphed to 
the Academy, stating how contrary it was to his w r ish 
to keep any of his procedures secret, and furnishing the 
requisite details. It would seem that he had only delayed 
doing so in order to make further investigations before 
communicating them. The better way would have been 
to have delayed the original communication until these 
were perfected. M. Toussaint, it seems, takes some of 
the blood of an animal suffering from charbon , and separates 
from it by filtration, or kills by the application of heat, all 
the Bacteria which it contains, and then inoculates with it 
the animals w-hich he wushes to preserve from the disease. 
The inoculation having been practised, this liquid, devoid of 
living germs, acts on the economy in a special manner. It 
requires, however, from tw r elve to fourteen days for such 
action to become completed ; and if during this interval in¬ 
oculation with infecting Bacteria be performed they may 
pursue their ordinary evolution to the death of the animal. 
But after the period in question this is no longer the case ; 
for, whatever number of Bacteria be then introduced, they 
remain absolutely inert, the Bacteria succumbing and dis¬ 
appearing w ithout leaving any trace of their passage either in 
the blood or the tissues .—Medical Times ancl Gazette. 
