One of the correspondents of the Institute, the surgeon Sédillot, who was in Alsace at the head of an ambulance corps, and who himself performed as many as fifteen amputations in one day, addressed two noteworthy letters to the President of the Academy. Those letters mark a date in the history of surgery, and show how restricted was then in France the share of some of Pasteur’s ideas at the very time when in other countries they were adopted and followed. Lister, the celebrated English surgeon, having, he said, meditated on Pasteur’s theory of germs, and proclaimed himself his follower, convinced that complications and infection of wounds were caused by their giving access to living organisms and infectious germs, elements of trouble, often of death, had already in 1867 inaugurated a method of treatment. He attempted the destruction of germs floating in air by means of a vaporizer filled with a carbolic solution, then isolated and preserved the wound from the contact of the air. Sponges, drainage tubes, etc., were subjected to minute precautions; in one word, he created antisepsis. Four months before the war he had propounded the principles which should guide surgeons, but it occurred to no one in France, in the first battles, to apply the new method. “The horrible mortality amongst the wounded in battle,” writes Sédillot, “calls for the attention of all the friends of science and humanity. The surgeon’s art, hesitating and disconcerted, pursues a doctrine whose rules seem to flee before research.... Places where there are wounded are recognizable by the fetor of suppuration and gangrene.” Hundreds and thousands of wounded, their faces pale, but full of hope and desire to live, succumbed between the eighth and tenth day to gangrene and erysipelas. Those failures of the surgery of the past are plain to us now that the doctrine of germs has explained everything; but, at that time, such an avowal of impotence before the mysterious _contagium sui generis_, which, the doctors averred, eluded all research, and such awful statistics of mortality embittered the anguish of defeat. The Academy then attempted to take a share in the national co-operation by making a special study of any subject which interested the public health and defence. A sitting on methods of steering balloons was succeeded by another on various means of preserving meat during the siege. Then came an anxious inquiry into modes of alimentation of infants. At the end of October there were but 20,000 litres of milk per day to be procured in the whole of Paris, and the healthy were implored to abstain from it. It was a question of life and death for young children, and already many little coffins were daily to be seen on the road to the cemetery.