On his arrival he found to his joy that those who had practised seeding according to his rigorous prescriptions had met with complete success. Other silkworm cultivators, less well advised, duped by the decoying appearances of certain broods, had not taken the trouble to examine whether the moths were corpuscled; they were witnesses and victims of the failure Pasteur had prophesied. He now looked upon pébrine as conquered; but flachery remained, more difficult to prevent, being greatly dependent upon the accidents which traverse the life of a silkworm. Some of those accidents happen in spite of all precautions, such as a sudden change of temperature or a stormy day; but at least the leaves of the mulberry tree could be carefully kept from fermentation, or from contamination by dusts in the nurseries. Either of those two causes was sufficient to provoke a fatal disorder in silkworms, the feeding of which is so important that they increase to fifteen thousand times their own weight during the first month of their life. Accidental flachery could therefore be avoided by hygienic precautions. In order to prevent it from becoming hereditary, Pasteur--who had pointed out that the micro-organism which causes it develops at first in the intestinal canal of the worm and then becomes localized in the digestive cavity of the chrysalis--advised the following means of producing a healthy strain of silkworms: “This means,” writes M. Gernez, Pasteur’s assiduous collaborator in these studies, “does not greatly complicate operations, and infallibly ensures healthy seed. It consists in abstracting with the point of a scalpel a small portion of the digestive cavity of a moth, then mixing it with a little water and examining it with a microscope. If the moths do not contain the characteristic micro-organism, the strain they come from may unhesitatingly be considered as suitable for seeding. The flachery micro-organism is as easily recognized as the pébrine corpuscle.” The seed merchants, made uneasy by these discoveries which so gravely jeopardized their industry, spread the most slanderous reports about them and made themselves the willing echo of every imposture, however incredible. M. Laurent wrote to his daughter, Madame Pasteur, in a letter dated from Lyons (June 6): “It is being reported here that the failure of Pasteur’s process has excited the population of your neighbourhood so much that he has had to flee from Alais, pursued by infuriated inhabitants throwing stones after him.” Some of these legends lingered in the minds of ignorant people.