TRANSLATIONS FROM FOREIGN PAPERS. 
403 
variola would be the only exception, if it did not act alike. 
But numerous facts of transmission by simple cohabitation have 
furnished long ago the positive proof. There is certainly no 
practitioner who has not observed it. Whether there is diffusion 
in the atmosphere of the virus in the shape of vapor or only 
germs in the state of impalpable dust, the propagation has 
always taken place without possibility of suspecting an acci¬ 
dental inoculation. Still, I must say that many of the facts 
which have been named as proofs of this belief, are far from 
having the probative value that their authors have given to 
them. What I have said before of the various mechanisms by 
which, perhaps, an accidental inoculation may take place, will 
allow me to eliminate a few of them. For myself, in looking 
during several years for an observation of the kind to which 
I could not make serious objection, I have found but one 
which seems to have a real value. It is the following:— 
It concerns a colt that I had watched from birth. His dam, 
aged five years, had been bought, without knowing that she was 
in foal, seven or eight months before he was born. From his 
birth he was placed beside her in a box stall in a stable where a 
dozen horses were kept. Five months later a young horse was 
placed in the stable, precisely alongside the box where the mother 
and her little one were kept. Six or eight days after this young 
horse had horse-pox. He had an abundant discharge, a charac¬ 
teristic eruption on the face and different parts of the body. 
Several days later the colt, which had never been cleaned or 
brushed with currycombs or brushes, and which had always been 
isolated, became also affected, though the mother remained 
healthy. Fie had even the most complete attack that one could 
wish to see : laryngo-pharyngeal angina, pustular eruption, lym¬ 
phangitis on one cheek, sub-glossal abscess—nothing missing. 
He, however, was cured. 
I repeat, this is the only observation which I think I can con¬ 
sider as free from objection. Still, we are not to infer that it 
constitutes an entire and absolute proof of the transmission 
by volatile virus. I only, in fact, consider it as merely estab¬ 
lishing a strong presumption, and I believe that others like it 
