Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/824

munication is vaccination in relation to chicken-cholera and splenic fever, and a statement of the method by which we have arrived at these results—a method the fruitfulness of which inspires me with boundless anticipations. Before discussing the question of splenic fever vaccine, which is the most important, permit me to recall the results of my investigations of chicken-cholera. It is through this inquiry that new and highly-important principles have been introduced into science concerning the virus or contagious quality of transmissible diseases. More than once, in what I am about to say, I shall employ the expression virus-culture, as formerly, in my investigations on fermentation, I used the expressions, the culture of milk-ferment, the culture of the butyric vibrion, etc. Let us take, then, a fowl which is about to die of chicken-cholera, and let us dip the end of a delicate glass rod in the blood of the fowl with the usual precautions, upon which I need not here dwell. Let us then touch, with this charged point, some bouillon de poulle, very clear, but first of all rendered sterile under a temperature of about 115° Centigrade, and under conditions in which neither the outer air nor the vases employed can introduce exterior germs—those germs which are in the air, or on the surface of all objects. In a short time, if the little culture-vase is placed in a temperature of 25° to 35°, you will see the liquid become turbid, and full of tiny microbes, shaped like the figure 8, but often so small that, under a high magnifying power, they appear like points. Take from this vase a drop as small as you please—no more than can be carried on the point of a glass rod as sharp as a needle and touch with this point a fresh quantity of sterilized bouillon de poulle placed in a second vase, and the same phenomenon is produced. You deal in the same way with a third culture-vase, with a fourth, and so on to a hundred, or even a thousand, and invariably, within a few hours, the culture-liquid becomes turbid and filled with the same minute organisms. At the end of two or three days' exposure to a temperature of about 30° Cent., the thickness of the liquid disappears, and a sediment is formed at the bottom of the vase. This signifies that the development of the minute organism has ceased—in other words, all the little points which caused the turbid appearance of the liquid have fallen to the bottom of the vase, and things will remain in this condition for a longer or shorter time, for months even, without either the liquid or the deposit undergoing any visible modification, inasmuch as we have taken care to exclude the germs of the atmosphere. A little stopper of cotton sifts the air which enters or issues from the vase through changes of temperature. Let us take one of our series of culture preparations—the hundredth or the thousandth, for instance—and compare it, in respect to its virulence, with the blood of a fowl which has died of cholera; in other words, let us inoculate under the skin ten fowls, for instance, each separately with a tiny drop of infectious blood, and ten others with a similar quantity of the liquid in which