XVIL] SEPTIC AND PATHOGENIC ORGANISMS. 215 



applied by Koch to Buchner's experiments, and I must fully 

 endorse it. 



But there is a much more serious statement of Buchner's 

 serious, because if true in nature, it is dreadful to contem- 

 plate to what amount of anthrax man and brute may become 

 subject viz., that he maintains to have succeeded in trans- 

 forming the hay bacillus into bacillus anthracis, by carrying 

 the former through many generations under ever varying 

 change of soil. It is needless to detail here all these experi- 

 ments of Buchner, since I do not attach any great value to 

 them, and I should not have troubled myself much about 

 them, were it not that one meets in mycological literature, 

 particularly on the part of botanists, an acceptance of 

 Buchner's statement that hay bacillus can change into the 

 pathogenic bacillus anthracis (see Zopf, Die Spaltpilze, 

 Breslau. 1883). 



I have repeated Buchner's experiments on rabbits, guinea- 

 pigs, and white mice. I have grown the hay bacillus in 

 various kinds of broth, in gelatine broth mixtures, in hydro- 

 cele fluid, in peptone fluid, in Agar-Agar and peptone, at 

 temperatures varying between 30 and 38 C, and I have, 

 to put it shortly, never seen that it shows the least tendency 

 to change its morphological characters, or that it ever 

 assumes any morphological or physiological character like 

 the bacillus anthracis. I consider this a perfectly hopeless 

 task, and I feel sure any one might as soon attempt to 

 transform the bulb of the common onion into the bulb of 

 the poisonous colchicum. 



But Buchner states that with his cultures of hay bacillus 

 carried through many generations under varying conditions 

 of soil, he inoculated white mice, which died under symptoms 

 of anthrax, and whose blood contained the typical bacillus 

 anthracis. I do not for a moment doubt that he really had 



