It might have been prophesied at that date that Pasteur’s surprised delight at seeing his name gratefully inscribed on the great Italian establishment of sericiculture would one day be surpassed by his happiness in living to see realized some of the progress and benefits due to him, his name invoked in all operating theatres, engraved over the doors of medical and surgical wards, and a new era inaugurated. A presentiment of the future deliverance of Humanity from those redoubtable microscopic foes gave Pasteur a fever for work, a thirst for new research, and an immense hope. But once again he constrained himself, refrained from throwing himself into varied studies, and, continuing what he had begun, reverted to his studies on splenic fever. The neighbourhood of Chartres being most afflicted, the Minister of Agriculture, anticipating the wish of the Conseil Général of the department of Eure et Loir, had entrusted Pasteur with the mission of studying the causes of so-called spontaneous charbon, that which bursts out unexpectedly in a flock, and of seeking for curative and preventive means of opposing the evil. Thirty-six years earlier, the learned veterinary surgeon, Delafond, had been sent to seek, particularly in the Beauce country, the causes of the charbon disease. Bouley, a great reader, said that there was no contrast more instructive than that which could be seen between the reasoning method followed by Delafond and the experimental method practised by Pasteur. It was in 1842 that Delafond received from M. Cunin Gridaine, then Minister of Agriculture, the mission of “going to study that malady on the spot, to seek for its causes, and to examine particularly whether those causes did not reside in the mode of culture in use in that part of the country.” Delafond arrived in the Beauce, and, having seen that the disease struck the strongest sheep, it occurred to him that it came from “an excess of blood circulating in the vessels.” He concluded from that that there might be a correlation between the rich blood of the Beauce sheep and the rich nitrogenous pasture of their food. He therefore advised the cultivators to diminish the daily ration; and he was encouraged in his views by noting that the frequency of the disease diminished in poor, damp, or sandy soils. Bouley, in order to show up Delafond’s efforts to make facts accord with his reasoning, added that to explain “a disease, of which the essence is general plethora, becoming contagious and expressing itself by charbon symptoms in man,” Delafond had imagined that the atmosphere of the pens, into which the animals were crowded, was laden with evil gases and putrefying emanations which produced an alteration of the blood “due at the same time to a slow asphyxia and to the introduction through the lungs of septic elements into the blood.”