214 
A. LIAUTARD. 
of the preceding one, we have seen that the product of the last 
cultivation was capable of multiplication and of action in the 
bodies of animals in giving them anthrax with all its symptoms. 
Such is, for us, the undisputable proof that anthrax is the 
disease of the bacteridie. 
Concerning the septic vibrio, our researches had not been so 
convincing, and it is to fill up this vacuum that we renewed at 
first our experiments. With this object in view, we attempted 
the cultivation of the septic vibrio, obtained on an animal which 
died with septicaemia. Remarkable fact, all our first experiments 
failed, notwithstanding the varieties of the means of cultivation 
that we used—urine, water of the swills of beer, bouillon of 
meat, &c. 
Our liquids did not remain infertile, but we obtained gener- 
allv a microscopic organism, having no connection with the septic 
vibrio, and having the form, very common, of chaplets, of sphe¬ 
roid small beads extremely fine and without any virulency. It is 
an impurity sowed unknowningly at the same time with the septic 
vibrio, and whose germ passed, no doubt, from the intestines, 
always inflamed and distended in septicemic animals, into the abdomi¬ 
nal serosity where we first collected the seed of the septic vibrio. 
If that supposition, regarding the impurity of our cultivation, 
was correct, we ought, apparently, obtain the pure septic vibrio 
in taking it from the blood taken in the heart of an animal dead 
recently from septicaemia. That is what happened, but another 
difficulty appeared—all our cultivations remained unfertile. More 
than that, this sterility was accompanied with the sort of virulent 
:ower of the seed in the liquid of cultivation. 
We then had the idea that the septic vibrio might be an ex¬ 
clusively aneorabic organism, and that the sterility of our sowed 
liquids was due to the fact that the vibrio was killed by the oxy¬ 
gen of the air in solution in those liquids. The Academy will 
remember that in other experiments I had noticed similar facts 
upon the vibrio of the butyric fermentation, vibrio which not 
only lives without air, but which is killed by it.* 
* Is not this vibrio the same as the septic one, a new study that we have 
begun? 
I 
