Thus I saw, that it corresponded exactly with the organism of furuncles.  The diameter of the individuals was found to be one one-thousandth of a millimeter.  If I ventured to express myself so I might say that in this case at least the osteomyelitis was really a furuncle of the bone marrow. [Footnote:  This has been demonstrated, as is well known.—­Translator.] It is undoubtedly easy to induce osteomyelitis artificially in living animals.

III.  On puerperal fever.—­First observation.  On the twelfth of March, 1878, Dr. Hervieux was good enough to admit me to his service in the Maternity to visit a woman delivered some days before and seriously ill with puerperal fever.  The lochia were extremely fetid.  I found them full of micro-organisms of many kinds.  A small amount of blood was obtained from a puncture on the index finger of the left hand, (the finger being first properly washed and dried with a sterile towel,) and then sowed in chicken bouillon.  The culture remained sterile during the following days.

The thirteenth, more blood was taken from a puncture in the finger and this time growth occurred.  As death took place on the sixteenth of March at six in the morning, it seems that the blood contained a microscopic parasite at least three days before.

The fifteenth of March, eighteen hours before death, blood from a needle-prick in the left foot was used.  This culture also was fertile.

The first culture, of March thirteenth, contained only the organism of furuncles; the next one, that of the fifteenth, contained an organism resembling that of furunculosis, but which always differed enough to make it easy usually to distinguish it.  In this way; whilst the parasite of furuncles is arranged in pairs, very rarely in chains of three or four elements, the new one, that of the culture of the fifteenth, occurs in long chains, the number of cells in each being indefinite.  The chains are flexible and often appear as little tangled packets like tangled strings of pearls.

The autopsy was performed on the seventeenth at two o’clock.  There was a large amount of pus in the peritoneum.  It was sowed with all possible precautions.  Blood from the basilic and femoral veins was also sowed.  So also was pus from the mucous surface of the uterus, from the tubes, and finally that from a lymphatic in the uterine wall.  These are the results of these cultures:  in all there were the long chains of cells just spoken of above, and nowhere any mixture of other organisms, except in the culture from the peritoneal pus, which, in addition to the long chains, also contained the small pyogenic vibrio which I describe under the name organism of pus in the Note I published with Messrs. Joubert and Chamberland on the thirtieth of April, 1878. [Footnote:  See preceding paper.]