It would have been but justice to recall other researches connected with Delafond’s name. In 1863, Delafond had collected some blood infected with charbon, and, at a time when such experiments had hardly been thought of, he had attempted some experiments on the development of the bacteridium, under a watch glass, at the normal blood temperature. He had seen the little rods grow into filaments, and compared them to a “very remarkable mycelium.” “I have vainly tried to see the mechanism of fructification,” added Delafond, “but I hope I still may.” Death struck down Delafond before he could continue his work. In 1869 a scientific congress was held at Chartres; one of the questions examined being this: “What has been done to oppose splenic fever in sheep?” A veterinary surgeon enumerated the causes which contributed, according to him, to produce and augment mortality by splenic fever: bad hygienic conditions; tainted food, musty or cryptogamized; heated and vitiated air in the crowded pens, full of putrid manure; paludic miasma or effluvia; damp soil flooded by storms, etc., etc. A well-known veterinary surgeon, M. Boutet, saw no other means to preserve what remained of a stricken flock but to take it to another soil, which, in contradiction with his colleague, he thought should be chosen cool and damp. No conclusion could be drawn. The disastrous loss caused by splenic fever in the Beauce alone was terrible; it was said to have reached 20,000,000 francs in some particularly bad years. The migration of the tainted flock seemed the only remedy, but it was difficult in practice and offered danger to other flocks, as carcases of dead sheep were wont to mark the road that had been followed. Pasteur, starting from the fact that the charbon disease is produced by the bacteridium, proposed to prove that, in a department like that of Eure et Loir, the disease maintained itself by itself. When an animal dies of splenic fever in a field, it is frequently buried in the very spot where it fell; thus a focus of contagion is created, due to the anthrax spores mixed with the earth where other flocks are brought to graze. Those germs, thought Pasteur, are probably like the germs of the flachery vibrio, which survive from one year to another and transmit the disease. He proposed to study the disease on the spot. It almost always happened that, when he was most anxious to give himself up entirely to the study of a problem, some new discussion was started to hinder him. He had certainly thought that the experimental power of giving anthrax to hens had been fully demonstrated, and that that question was dead, as dead as the inoculated and immersed hen.