Colin, after speaking about several other things, ended by saying: “I regret that I have not until now been able to hand to M. Pasteur a hen dying or dead of anthrax. The two that I had bought for that purpose were inoculated several times with very active blood, but neither of them has fallen ill. Perhaps the experiment might have succeeded afterwards, but, one fine day, a greedy dog prevented that by eating up the two birds, whose cage had probably been badly closed.” On the Tuesday which followed this incident, the passers-by were somewhat surprised to see Pasteur emerging from the Ecole Normale, carrying a cage, within which were three hens, one of them dead. Thus laden, he took a fiacre, and drove to the Académie de Médecine, where, on arriving, he deposited this unexpected object on the desk. He explained that the dead hen had been inoculated with charbon two days before, at twelve o’clock on the Sunday, with five drops of yeast water employed as a nutritive liquid for pure bacteridium germs, and that it had died on the Monday at five o’clock, twenty-nine hours after the inoculation. He also explained, in his own name, and in the names of Messrs. Joubert and Chamberland, how in the presence of the curious fact that hens were refractory to charbon, it had occurred to them to see whether that singular and hitherto mysterious preservation did not have its cause in the temperature of a hen’s body, “higher by several degrees than the temperature of the body of all the animal species which can be decimated by charbon.” This preconceived idea was followed by an ingenious experiment. In order to lower the temperature of an inoculated hen’s body, it was kept for some time in a bath, the water covering one-third of its body. When treated in that way, said Pasteur, the hen dies the next day. “All its blood, spleen, lungs, and liver are filled with bacilli anthracis susceptible of ulterior cultures either in inert liquids or in the bodies of animals. We have not met with a single exception.” As a proof of the success of the experiment, the white hen lay on the floor of the cage. As people might be forthcoming, even at the Academy, who would accuse the prolonged bath of having caused death, one of the two living hens, a gray one, who was extremely lively, had been placed in the same bath, at the same temperature and during the same time. The third one, a black hen, also in perfect health, had been inoculated at the same time as the white hen, with the same liquid, but with ten drops instead of five, to make the comparative result more convincing; it had not been subjected to the bath treatment. “You can see how healthy it is,” said Pasteur; “it is therefore impossible to doubt that the white hen died of charbon; besides, the fact is proved by the bacteridia which fill its body.”