TRANSLATION. 
217 
be looked for in most instances ? It is the positive proof that 
there exists diseases transmissible, contagions, infectious, whose 
cause resides essentially and uniquely in the presence of micro¬ 
scopic organism. It is the proof that, for a certain number of 
diseases, we must forever drop all ideas of spontaneous virulency, 
the ideas of contagion and infection rising all at once in the 
bodies of men and animals to go and propagate themselves after¬ 
wards, under forms yet identical to themselves, all opinions fatal 
to medical progress and which rose from the gratuitous hypothe¬ 
sis of spontaneous generation, of ferments albuminoid matters, 
of hemi-organisms, of archebiosis and many other conceptions, 
without foundation in observation. 
What must be looked for, in fact, is the proof that aside of 
our vibrio, there is no independent virulency proper to the liquid 
or solid matters, and that the vibrio is not only an epiphenomena 
of the disease of which it is the obliged companion. And what 
do we see in the results that I have made known ? We see a sep¬ 
tic liquid, taken at a certain time, when the vibrois are not yet 
transformed in germs, loose all virulency by the simple contact 
of the air, preserve, on the contrary, this virulency, though ex¬ 
posed to the contact of the air, with the only condition to have 
been in thickness during several hours. In the first case, after 
loss of virulency to the contact of the air, the liquid is unable 
to take that power again through cultivation ; but in the second 
case, it conserves it and may propagate it even after having been 
exposed to the contact of the air. It is, then, impossible to sus¬ 
tain that aside of the adult vibrio or of its germ; there exists a 
virulent matter proper, liquid or solid. One cannot even suppose 
a virulent matter which would lose its virulency just at the same 
time that the adult vibrio dies, for this pretended matter would 
equally lose its virulency when the vibrios transformed into gems 
are exposed to the contact of the air. As in this case the viru¬ 
lency perishes, this can be but the fact of the exclusive presence 
of these germ-corpuscles. There remains but one hypothesis for 
the existence of a virulent matter in the soluble state; it is that 
such a matter, in sufficient quantity to destroy in our experiments 
of inoculation, would be constantly furnished by the vibrit) itself 
