A. LIAUTARP. 
259 
vibrio. Sometimes the little lenticular body ends on one side with 
an elongated appendage, assuming the form of the tongue of a 
bell. We have also seen the septic vibrio with the form of little 
sticks extremely short, very minute; but what is most surpris¬ 
ing, is the facility with which the septic vibrio may reproduce 
itself without showing the slightest motion, losing then a certain 
amount of its virulency, but never being entirely harmless. For 
a long time, we even believed that we had two or more septic vib¬ 
rios of different forms or virulency, and that by our cultivation 
we had obtained separations, more or less complete, of each of 
these different vibrios. It was not so. We have found in septi¬ 
caemia, proper only one vibrio, which may change in aspect, in 
facility of propagation, in virulency among the liquids where it is 
cultivated. 
The best proof that we have had, in our numerously repeated 
experiments, only one vibrio, is that the last cultivations were 
brought back to their power of virulency of the beginning by 
changing the liquids of those cultivation. Let us reproduce ten ? 
twenty, thirty times in succession, the septic vibrio in Liebig’s 
bouillon, and to this let us substitute bloody serum containing few 
fibrinous clots, the new culture will furnish a powerful septic 
vibrio, killing at a 1-2000 of a drop, and the blood and serosity of 
the animal thus killed will possess at once a power of virulency 
much higher witli the forms and methods of the septic vibrio. 
From the preceding facts let us remark how premature are, 
in the present state of our knowledge, the classifications and nom¬ 
enclatures proposed for beings which may change in aspect and 
properties, as much as we have shown through external conditions. 
In the study of microscopic beings, any method is precious, 
if by it one may succeed in separating from each other numerous 
species whose association is so common. The properties of the 
ferments living without air, placed us a moment ago on the dis¬ 
covery of one of those methods. I mean to say of the cultivation 
in the vacuum, opposite to the one made in presure of the atmos¬ 
pheric air. LIow many aerobic germs are mixed with those of an 
anerobic organization, cultivation in vacuum will allow us to 
separate them. It will be the same for a mixture of germs 
