214 
A. LIAUTARD 
proceeds, in placing it at work in the different organisms, and making it 
produce its effects. That is one of the most important facts to the 
point ot view of all contagions, as what is exposed for one authorizes us 
to admit, by analogy of manifestation, that in the others the conditions 
of development are identical. 
Admitting that contagion is the most essential distinctive character- 
lsuc of anthrax, and knowing the agent-instrument of its transmission, 
.1 asteur, it seems to me, has given a perfectly exact definition of the 
disease, where he defined it by this agent itself, the bacteridie, which is 
onnd in all species identical to itself, by the properties it possesses, 
r0m " latevel s 1 It may proceed, to develop in all anthrax, char¬ 
acterized in each one respectively by its proper symptomatic conditions. 
Now that, thanks to the researches of M. Davaine, who, the first, 
as M. Pasteur has so well shown, has discovered the corpuscles of an¬ 
thrax, and has assigned to them their duty as exclusive agents of viru- 
lency thanks, also, to the labors of M. Koch, of Breslau, and at last 
to t lose ol M. Pasteur now, 1 say, that the carbunculous virus has 
a en form that it can be seen and put to its work of fecundation in 
le vases where it is cultivated, important researches remain to be made 
to give the interpretation of all'the facts met in practice. 
If, as proved by the observation, anthrax finds the conditions of its 
eve opment in damp localities, when excessive hot weather, following 
heavy rains, give rise to fermentation in stagnant water, marshy lands 
etc., it is probable that these conditions are favorable to the reproduc¬ 
tion of the bacterid,es from which anthrax proceeds', and that animals 
living m these localities absorb them, either in perfect state or in the 
state of spores, and are thus infected. The etiology of anthrax will be 
complete only when microscopic researches made in the infecting local¬ 
ities w ill have».shown these carbunculous bacteridies there, and shown 
lem at work in the development of these local epizootics that old 
practice named spontaneous, ignorant as it was, of the condition of 
their genesis. 
It has been said in the above symptomatic expose that anthrax, in 
one of its forms, in the large species, showed itself by external conges¬ 
tion, giving rise to tumors, after the apparition of which the general 
symptoms would improve and even disappear, if these tumors became 
■ P m aneously the seat of an expulsive inflammation, or if they were 
destroyed by deep cauterization. 
This practical fact differs much from the experiments of inocula- 
lion, which proves that it requires but a very small drop of liquid loaded 
