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with the vibrious of anthrax to produce the general infection of the 
body followed by consequences most unavoidably fatal. How, in an 
organism infected by natural absorption, and in which the general in¬ 
fection is arrested by an intense symptomatic fever, can all the bacteri¬ 
dies, at a given time, collect together in the external regions, so that, if 
they are destroyed at these points, the whole organism is freed of them 
and health returns ? Here is a fact which agrees with difficulty with 
the activity of the reproduction that experiments have proved to be one 
of the attributes of the bacteridies. 
Here is another fact, whose interpretation is not without being 
embarrassing, or, at least, seems so. Experience proves that when a 
flock of animals emigrates from localities where anthrax prevails, to 
others where the condition of its development do not exist, the number 
of the sick gradually diminishes, and soon the disease disappears. The 
influence of the surroundings seem, then, necessary from these facts, so 
that the bacteridies naturally introduced into the organism of the sheep 
subsist in them, and give rise to the disease which is the expression of 
the manifestation of their special activity ; and, nevertheless, bacter¬ 
idies inoculated to the sheep, outside the influence of these surround¬ 
ings, do not remain inactive ; they produce their effects, even with an 
extreme intensity. Why such difference ? 
The question of the infection requires also further examination. 
Anthrax is transmissable at a distance ; it can rise from the trenches 
where carbuncular cadavers are buried. How does that transportation 
take place ? 
If I present these different questions, it is not that I desire to pro¬ 
test against the correctness of the conclusions derived from the experi¬ 
ments of the laboratory. I believe that they throw a great light upon 
the nature of anthrax, and upon the conditions of its manifestations. I 
believe, also, that to the general point of view of contagious diseases, they 
are of principal importance. When the subject of anthrax, whose virus 
is to-day recognized and known, will have received all the solutions that 
the problem of practice presents, this complete study of a disease so 
powerfully virulent and, in a certain measure, infectious, will not fail to 
throw light also upon the other contagious diseases. 
For this reason I have thought proper to call attention to these 
different points. The nature of anthrax being now known by the ex¬ 
periments of the laboratory, the contradictions between their results and 
the practical facts cannot be fundamental, certainly they are so only in 
appearance. Subsequent researches will not fail to unite them, and 
