U20 Transactions of the Society. 



vital importance, fur troops will usually prefer to run the risks, 

 attaching to the use of a dangerous water that is bright and 

 sparkling to drinking a sterile water that is flat or otherwise 

 unpalatable. Gentlemen, the culture method supplemented the 

 Microscope in the early days of bacteriology, and now this simple 

 chemical method forms merely an additional supplement ; but I 

 believe that as it becomes more widely recognized and its use 

 extended, many of the difficulties hitherto standing in the way of 

 the sterilization of water will gradually disappear, and I am 

 satisfied that for the use of the Army in the field no other method, 

 unless based on the same principle, can, in the present state of 

 our knowledge, supplant it. 



During the last month or six weeks the attention of Medical 

 men throughout the kingdom has been attracted to happenings- 

 on Salisbury Plain, where, amongst the Cauadians there encamped, 

 epidemic cerebro-spinal meningitis, one form of the old spotted 

 fever, has made bold to raise its head. Many of us who have 

 had little experience of this disease thought of it as a disease 

 that was not likely to break out in other quarters, though, 

 considering the conditions that exist in various parts of the 

 country, we might well have anticipated that having made its 

 appearance in one spot it was likely, if former experience could 

 give us any lead, to put in an appearance wherever men are 

 crowded together in tents, hutments or billets. There has been 

 an outbreak in Cambridge, an outbreak that will, in due course, 

 be described in full from various points of view and by different 

 workers ; but as I have had an opportunity of seeing a number of 

 patients, of following the bacteriological investigations carried out 

 by Dr. L. Cobbett and Captain Gaskell, of examining a number of 

 contacts, and of discussing with Colonel Griffiths, Captain Foster 

 and Lieutenant Fiddian the chemical and biological conditions 

 under which the specific organism causally associated with this 

 disease manages to keep up the continuity of its species, I beg 

 that you will allow me to take these cases as a text on which to 

 base a few remarks, and as affording an opportunity of putting 

 a number of questions, the answers to which I hope will be the 

 outcome of the many investigations into the cause and course of 

 this disease that are now being carried out in various parts of 

 the country. I am afraid that here, again, my remarks may have 

 a somewhat medical flavour, though they refer to something of far 

 wider importance than a merely medical question, and so far, I 

 think, we, as a Microscopical Society, may interest ourselves in it. 

 Epidemic cerebro-spinal meningitis or fever was only differentiated 

 as a separate disease in the first half-dozen years of the nineteenth 

 century. Though more or less sporadic in its incidence, it has 

 every now and again taken the form of distinct epidemics. It was 

 first described as one form of jail or spotted fever, and, for some 



