“As soon as Pasteur left the carriage he hurried to the folds. Standing motionless by the gate, he would gaze at the lots which were being experimented upon, with a careful attention which nothing escaped; he would spend hours watching one sheep which seemed to him to be sickening. We had to remind him of the time and to point out to him that the towers of Chartres Cathedral were beginning to disappear in the falling darkness before we could prevail upon him to come away. He questioned farmers and their servants, giving much credit to the opinions of shepherds, who on account of their solitary life, give their whole attention to their flocks and often become sagacious observers.” When again at Arbois, on September 17, Pasteur began to write to the Minister of Agriculture a note on the practical ideas suggested by this first campaign. A few sheep, bought near Chartres and gathered in a fold, had received, amongst the armfuls of forage offered them, a few anthrax spores. Nothing had been easier than to bring these from the laboratory, in a liquid culture of bacteria, and to scatter them on the field where the little flock grazed. The first meals did not give good scientific results, death was not easily provoked. But when the experimental menu was completed by prickly plants, likely to wound the sheep on their tongue or in their pharynx, such, for instance, as thistles or ears of barley, the mortality began. It was perhaps not as considerable as might have been wished for demonstration purposes, but nevertheless it was sufficient to explain how charbon could declare itself, for necropsy showed the characteristic lesions of the so-called spontaneous splenic fever. It was also to be concluded therefrom that the evil begins in the mouth, or at the back of the throat, supervening on meals of infected food, alone or mixed with prickly plants likely to cause abrasion. It was therefore necessary, in a department like that of Eure et Loir, which must be full of anthrax germs,--particularly on the surface of the graves containing carcases of animals which had fallen victims to the disease,--that sheep farmers should keep from the food of their animals plants such as thistles, ears of barley, and sharp pieces of straw; for the least scratch, usually harmless to sheep, became dangerous through the possible introduction of the germs of the disease. “It would also be necessary” wrote Pasteur, “to avoid all probable diffusion of charbon germs through the carcases of animals dying of that disease, for it is likely that the department of Eure et Loir contains those germs in greater quantities than the other departments; splenic fever having long been established there, it always goes on, dead animals not being disposed of so as to destroy all germs of ulterior contagion.”