I)R. WILLEMS. 
359 
till 1880. A new farmer came and placed in that barn four cows, 
coming from a farm where they were raised, and where there 
never was a case of pleuro-pneumonia. These animals had not 
been in contact with any other diseased beast and nevertheless 
two amongst them became pneumonic. Is this a case of spon¬ 
taneous pleuro-pneumonia! No, it is more than probable that the 
miasma of the disease was preserved in that barn since the exist¬ 
ence of the epizootic which prevailed there. What we observe, 
concerning the long duration of the conservation of the miasma 
of pleuro-pneumonia, was observed also for several contagious 
diseases of man. 
Mr. Hairion, the learned Professor of the University of 
Louvain, our honorable colleague, cites analogous cases relating to 
granular palpebral ophthalmia, an affection which he has perfectly 
studied and upon which he has thrown so much light. He relates 
in his Memoir upon that disease in the army, published in 
1848, facts observed in the barracks of the Dames-Blanches at 
Louvain, and in the young ladies’ school at Thildonck, where the 
contagious principle was propagated by the medium of contam¬ 
inated objects and was preserved in the said barracks of the 
Dames-Blanches for a long time, when, under the influence of 
favorable circumstances, it returned in the air, thus forming new 
centers of infection, susceptible of reproducing the disease amongst 
those living in it. 
Mr. Hairion reports that soldiers arriving perfectly healthy in 
the barracks, and being carefully examined, contracted palpebral 
ophthalmia in the undisinfected and empty rooms, where in one 
cast, eighteen months, and in another three years before, diseased 
men had lodged. 
And again, the experiments made by Mr. Pasteur, relating 
to the theory of spontaneous generation, have proved that all over 
in the air are suspended the germs of lower organisms and more 
particularly in hospitals, rooms with large gatherings of people, 
stables, &c., &c. 
In 1861 Dr. Eisel, of Prague, placed between two beds, in a 
ward occupied by thirty-three children affected with purulent 
opthalmia, an instrument analogous to the areoscope of Pouchet; 
