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Updated: June 24, 2025
But, if oxygen destroys the vibrios, how can septicemia exist, since atmospheric air is present everywhere? How can such facts be brought in accord with the germ theory? How can blood, exposed to air, become septic through the dust the air contains? All things are hidden, obscure and debatable if the cause of the phenomena be unknown, but everything is clear if this cause be known.
From these gemmules we have ultimately produced vibrios, ready to reproduce others by the process of transverse division for a certain time, to be themselves encysted, later on.
In the course of half an hour, all the vibrios in the aerated tube were dead, or at least motionless, and fermentation had ceased. In the other tube, after three hours' exposure to the effects of the carbonic acid gas, the vibrios were still very active, and fermentation was going on. There is a most simple method of observing the deadly effect of atmospheric air upon vibrios.
But these vibrios move among the corpuscles of the blood just as a snake moves through the grass, to quote Pasteur. If I colored them you would see that each is covered with fine vibrating hairs three or four times as long as itself. At certain times an oval mass forms in them. That is the spore which lives so long and is so hard to kill. It was the spores that were on the bullet.
We there demonstrated that, when we place in water some of the dust formed of desiccated vibrios, containing a host of these refractive corpuscles, in the course of a very few hours large vibrios appear, well-developed rods fully grown, in which the brilliant points are absent; whilst in the water no process of development from smaller vibrios is to be discerned, a fact which seems to show that the former had issued fully grown from the refractive corpuscles, just as we see colpoda issue with their adult aspect from the dust of their cysts.
The gemmules with brilliant corpuscles had almost disappeared; we could see but very few, and those now consisted of the refractive bodies alone, the bulk of the vibrios accompanying them having undergone some process of re-absorption.
The cysts appear as masses of corpuscles, in which the most practiced eye cannot detect anything of an organic nature, or anything to remind one of the vibrios which produced them; nevertheless, these minute bodies are endowed with a latent vital action, and only await favourable conditions to develop long rods of vibrios.
In the course of a few days fermentation declared itself: on the 18th it was active; on the 30th it was very active. On June 1st it yielded hourly 35 cc. On the 2nd we began the study of the action of air on the vibrios of this fermentation. We then reversed the flask with the opening under the mercury, and shook it every ten minutes for more than an hour.
It does not require much skill in experiments of this kind to enable one to see plainly that immediately after the glass has been placed on the drop, which has been affected all over by atmospheric air, the whole of the vibrios seem to languish and to manifest symptoms of illness we can think of no better expression to explain what we see taking place and that they gradually recover their activity about the centre, in proportion as they find themselves in a part of the medium that is less affected by the presence of oxygen.
In the case of the latter, we generally see all movement at once cease near the edges of the glass, where the drop of liquid is in direct contact with the air; the movements continue for a longer or shorter time about the centre, in proportion as the air is more or less intercepted by the vibrios at the circumference of the liquid.
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