216 
A. LIAUTARD 
and waters. Where can these corpuscles take birth '? Well, 
nothing more easy than the production of these germs, not¬ 
withstanding the presence of the air in contact with the septic 
liquids. 
Let us take some abdominal serosity, with septic vibrios, all in 
the way of generation by scission, and let us expose it to the con¬ 
tact of the air as we did it, with only the precaution, however, of 
giving it a certain thickness, even of only one centimeter, and in 
a few hours we will see the following strange phenomena : In 
the superior layer of the liquid, the oxygen is absorbed, as it is 
manifested by the change of color of the liquid. There the 
vibrio dies and disappears. In the deep layers, on the contrary, 
at the bottom of this centimeter in thickness of the septic liquid 
upon which we are experimenting, the vibrios, protected against 
the action of the oxygen by those which die on the top, continue 
to multiply by scission. Thus, little by little, they pass to the 
state of germs-eorpuscles with resorption of the remaining of the 
body of the filiform vibrio. Then, in the place of moving- 
threads of linear dimensions of different sizes, whose length often 
surpasses that of the plate of the microscope, we only find a dust 
of shying points,* isolated or surrounded by an amorphous mass, 
scarcely visible. And thus is formed, living with the latent life 
of the germs, fearless of the destroying action of the oxygen, 
the septic dust. And thus we are prepared to understand what 
at first seemed to us all obscure. We can comprehend the sow¬ 
ing of putrescible liquids by the dusts of the atmosphere; we can 
comprehend the permanency of putrid diseases on the surface of 
the earth. 
May the Academy allow me to abandon these curious facts 
without showing one of the most principal theoretical conse¬ 
quences. At the beginning of these researches—for they only 
begin—and though already a new world is discovered, what is to 
* In our note of July 16th, 1877, we said that the septic vibrio is not killed 
by the oxygen of the air, nor by the oxygen at high pressure; that it is trans¬ 
formed in these conditions in germ-corpuscles. There is there an erroneous in¬ 
terpretation of the fact. The vibrio is killed by oxygen, and it is only when it 
is in thickness that it is transformed, by the absence of this gas, into germ-cor¬ 
puscles, and that its virulency may be perpetuated. 
