202 SUMMARY OF CURRENT RESEARCHES RELATING TO 



nose, glycerin, and inulin. All six strains failed to ferment erythrite, 

 adonite, dulcite, and dextrin ; none liquefied gelatin, and Vosges and 

 Proskauer's reaction was negative in each case. 



New Foetid Coccobacillus.*— R. S. Williams and W. R. Wade 

 isolated from a case of suppurative foetid arthritis a coccobacillus which 

 has the following characters. It is motionless, polymorphic, does not 

 stain by Gram's method, does not form spores, has no capsule, and is 

 a strict aerobe. It gr <ws well on the usual media, the colonies at first 

 transparent become yellowish after the second day. Broth is rendered 

 turbid and gelatin is slowly liquefied. Milk is coagulated but no indol 

 is produced. It ferments glucose, galactose, and arabinose without pro- 

 duction of gas. Its action on other sugars is nil. It is non-proteolytic, 

 and when cultivated on nasgar, agar, or in broth, a foetid odour is 

 exhaled. It is pathogenic to mice, guinea-pigs, and rabbits. The differ- 

 ential diagnosis from other foetid bacteria is given. 



Bacterial Treatment of Peat.f — W. B. Bottomley describes the 

 methods of treating peat, and the beneficial effects of bacterized peat as 

 a dressing. After alluding to the failures, the author remarks that it 

 was by a happy chance discovered that certain aerobic bacteria possess 

 the power of converting natural peat into a " humated " neutral medium 

 to which Azotobacter^ is added. The treatment consists of three stages : 

 first, the raw peat is moistened with a culture solution of the special 

 " humating" ba< teria, and the mass kept at a constant temperature for 

 a week or ten days ; during this time the bacteria act on certain organic 

 constituents of the peat and gradually convert a large amount of the 

 humic acid present into soluble humates ; second, the humating bacteria, 

 having done their work, are destroyed by sterilizing the peat by live steam ; 

 third, the sterilized peat is treated with a mixed culture of nitrogen -fixing 

 organisms —Azotobacter cJiroococcum and Bacillus radicicola — and after a 

 few days' incubation at 26° C, is ready for use. The gratifying results 

 on soil, radishes, potatoes, turnips, grass, and Primula malacoides are 

 then given, and, to quote one example only, it was found that a plot of 

 radishes watered once only with an extract of the bacterized peat gave 

 an increase by weight of 54 p.c. over the untreated plot. 



* C.R. Soc. Biol. Paris, lxxvi. (1914) pp. 263-5. 

 t Joum. Roy. Soc. Arts, lxii (1914) pp. 373-80. 



X For information in regard to Azotobacter, see this Journal, 1901, p. 687 

 1906, p. 374 ; 1907, pp. 88, 468 : 1910, p. 109 ; 1911, p. 686 ; 1912, p. 342. 



