In the _Veterinary Press_, of which M. Rossignol was one of the editors, an article by him might have been read on the 31st January, 1881, less than a month before that great discovery on charbon vaccine, wherein he expressed himself as follows: “Will you have some microbe? There is some everywhere. Microbiolatry is the fashion, it reigns undisputed; it is a doctrine which must not even be discussed, especially when its Pontiff, the learned M. Pasteur, has pronounced the sacramental words, _I have spoken_. The microbe alone is and shall be the characteristic of a disease; that is understood and settled; henceforth the germ theory must have precedence of pure clinics; the Microbe alone is true, and Pasteur is its prophet.” At the end of March, M. Rossignol began a campaign, begging for subscriptions, pointing out how much the cultivators of the Brie--whose cattle suffered almost as much as that of the Beauce--were interested in the question. The discovery, _if it were genuine_, should not remain confined to the Ecole Normale laboratory, or monopolized by the privileged public of the Académie des Sciences, who had no use for it. M. Rossignol soon collected about 100 subscribers. Did he believe that Pasteur and his little phials would come to a hopeless fiasco in a farmyard before a public of old practitioners who had always been powerless in the presence of splenic fever? Microbes were a subject for ceaseless joking; people had hilarious visions of the veterinary profession confined some twenty years hence in a model laboratory assiduously cultivating numberless races, sub-races, varieties and sub-varieties of microbes. It is probable that, if light comes from above, a good many practitioners would not have been sorry to see a strong wind from below putting out Pasteur’s light. M. Rossignol succeeded in interesting every one in this undertaking. When the project was placed before the Melun Agricultural Society on the 2nd April, they hastened to approve of it and to accord their patronage. The chairman, Baron de la Rochette, was requested to approach Pasteur and to invite him to organize public experiments on the preventive vaccination of charbon in the districts of Melun, Fontainebleau and Provins. “The noise which those experiments will necessarily cause,” wrote M. Rossignol, “will strike every mind and convince those who may still be doubting; the evidence of facts will have the result of ending all uncertainty.”