powerful and colossal life which animates a horse or
an ox, threatened and destroyed by this miserable little
rod which we can see only under a microscope? This rod
appears, moreover, only some hours before death, and
when the animal is already very ill. Where is it and
what has it been doing earlier? You tell us, you who
believe in it, that it does not long survive the animal
which it has killed, and dies when the tissues decay.
But all animals dead of anthrax decay, for we bury
them quickly without making any use of them. And,
therefore, how do you explain that there are epidemics of
anthrax every year, epidemics which appear in the summer
after having disappeared from the country all winter?
How do you explain, also, that there are in Beauce
cursed fields, in Auvergnedangerous mountains, where
animals from the farm can neither be pastured nor
driven, without paying a tribute, more or less great,
to the disease? From this is it not evident that the
disease is attached to the soil, to the vegetation, and to
certain climatic conditions, which have nothing to do
with this bacteridium in the blood of diseased animals?

"All that we are able to grant you," the skeptics
might have added, "in the presence of your proofs and
of your experiments, is that this bacteridium is an
epiphenomenon. It sometimes accompanies the virus,
or follows it, but it is not the virus itself. The virus
of anthrax, like that of smallpox, or of sheeppox, is
something which one can handle without seeing it and
recognizing it. It exists, since the disease is inoculable,
but we do not see it outside of the animal. It is not
something independent of the animal but a modality of
its being. It is living, it may be granted you, but it
borrows its life from the being which carries it, it is
nothing outside of the animal, and we recognize it only
in transit through living beings."

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