'CONTAGIOUS DISEASES-NEW DISCOVERIES. 
401 
'elements of the preparation, cells, nuclei or microbes, have a blue 
Dr brown coloration. 
Gentlemen, these are already grand results. It remains for 
us, however, to learn how far, in the more practical point of 
therapeutics, the discovery may be useful to mankind, and until 
then, and especially for us veterinarians, the works of Pasteur, 
Chauveau, Arloing and others, in relation to other diseases of 
our domestic animals are probably of greater value and import¬ 
ance. 
The history of anthrax is too well known to us, for to make 
it necessary for me to treat it very largely. Looking back for 
centuries, among authors of works on animal husbandry, we find 
this disease described more or less accurately. Its existence is 
acknowledged in all parts of the globe, and we know that our 
own country is not exempt from its presence. But what a dif¬ 
ference appears between the anthrax of times past and that of 
our modern epoch—between that of those days and that of 
to-day! And what distinction must we make between what was 
called anthrax, anthrax-fever, splenic apoplexy, gloss-anthrax, 
black-leg, black murrain", and what not else, and that which 
to-day we are mentioning under the names of bacteridian and bac- 
terian anthrax; a change which is due to the world-famed dis¬ 
coveries of French investigators, at the head of which we must 
name Pasteur ! 
t 
This affection, which for }"ears we had been accustomed to 
consider as a single malady, whose true cause was ignored ; whose 
etiology was surrounded with so many various theories, more or 
less plausible or fanciful; which presented itself to the observers 
under numerous and variable forms, but proved almost always 
uniform in the fatality of its result, is to-day, by experimental 
medicine, and by investigations in the laboratory, demonstrated 
beyond a doubt to be two diseases essentially different in their 
nature, notwithstanding the similarity in their prognosis and 
appearance, and bearing so close a likeness in several of their 
manifestations. One is known to-day in the scientific world as 
bacteridie, or the bacteridian anthrax; the other is the disease of 
bacteria, the baeterian anthrax, and corresponding, the first to 
