TRANSLATION. 
215 
These results had a necessary consequence. By exposing a 
liquid loaded with septic vibrio to the contact of pure air, all the 
vibrios ought to be killed and the virulency be removed. That 
is what takes place. Let us place some drops of septic serosity, 
spread on thin layer in a tube laying horizontally, and in less than 
half a day the liquid will become entirely inoffensive, even when, 
at first, it was so virulent that the inoculation of the smallest 
fraction of a drop of it was followed by death. 
More than that, all the vibrios which till up the liquid in pro¬ 
fusion, under the form of moving threads, are destroyed and dis¬ 
appeared. After the action of the air, one finds only amorphous, 
fine granulations, unfit for cultivation or to the communication 
of any disease. It seems that the air burns the vibrios. 
[t is horrid to think that life may be at the mercy of the mul¬ 
tiplication of these infinitely small ones. It is also consoling to 
hope that science will not always remain powerless before such 
enemies, when we see it, on scarcely beginning our studies, learn¬ 
ing us for instance, that the simple contact of the air sometimes 
is sufficient to destroy them. 
But if oxygen destroys the vibrios, how can they exist in sep¬ 
ticaemia, where atmospheric air is everywhere present ? flow 
make these facts agree with the theory of the germs ? How can 
blood, exposed to the contact of air, become septic by the dusts 
that it contains 1 
All is concealed, obscure, and matter for discussion, when one 
ignores the cause of phenomena ; all is light when one possesses 
it. What we have just said is true only for the septic liquid 
loaded with adult vibrios, in way of generation by scissiparity; 
things differ when the vibrios are transformed in germs, that is 
in shying corpuscles, described for the first time in my studies 
upon the diseases of the silk worms, precisely in the occasion of 
the vibrios of the worms which had died of the disease called 
flacherie. Adult vibrios alone disappear, are burned and lose 
their virulency to the contact of the air; the corpuscles-germs, in 
those conditions, remain always ready for new inoculations. 
All this does not yet solve the difficulty of knowing how sep¬ 
tic germs may exist on the surface of floating objects in the air 
