226 
EDITORIAL. 
But there are men who never get tired of failures ; on the 
contrary, their courage for investigation is stimulated by them, 
and Prof. Nocard is certainly one of such men. At last he has 
succeeded in breaking through the thick mass of difficulties by 
obtaining cultures of the germ, and that by a process which he 
has borrowed from the work of Metchnikoff,Roux and Salimbeni, 
and which consists in cultivating the germ of a contagious dis¬ 
ease in vivo —that is, by placing in the abdominal cavity of an 
animal, a little sac of collodion containing a few citbic centimeters 
of bouillon in which the virulent substance has been inoculated^ 
and leaving it there for a variable length of time. 
Having recourse to this method. Nocard has succeeded in 
obtaining cultures of an opaline color, slightly albuminous, con¬ 
taining no cells nor bacteria which could be cultivated in ordi¬ 
nary bouillons, but an immense number of small refringent 
moving bodies, so minute that their form cannot be exactly de¬ 
termined, even after coloration. These small bodies are living 
organisms : they are the germs of pleuro-pneumonia. A series 
of experiments have proved it beyond a doubt. 
This is another great discovery attached to the reputation of 
the learned professor of Alfort, and when, with his usual mod¬ 
esty, he related the facts connected with his successful attempts, 
there were many among his listeners who predicted for him a 
name even greater than that of Pasteur. This discovery of 
the germ of pleuro-pneumonia, by cultivation in vivo of the 
virus, opens up a large field, and certainly now it can be hoped 
that other germs, which, like that of the bovine scourge, are yet 
unknown, whose cultures by ordinary processes have always 
failed, may at an early date be discovered, to be followed by 
subsequent facts connected with their study, modifications, at¬ 
tenuation, . . . and their serotherapic application can be 
looked for.* 
* 
* * 
Another Congress of Tuberculosis. —The fourth ses¬ 
sion of the Congress for the Study of Human and Animal 
* The detailed relation of Professor Nocard’s discovery is begun in this issue. 
