480 SUMMARY OF CURRENT RESEARCHES RELATING TO 



The streptobacillus is pathogenic for the white mouse and the rat, 

 death taking place in the case of the former in a few days, in the latter 

 in about three weeks, from a general infection. Babbits and guinea- 

 pigs only give a slight local reaction and a transitory adenitis. 



The author points out several points of similarity possessed by this 

 organism and that described by Kutscher. 



Lesions produced by Acid-resisting Bacilli.* — Abbott and Gilder- 

 sleeve communicate some observations which they believe constitute 

 additional evidence that the members of the acid-fast group are closely 

 allied botanically to members of the Actinomyces family. They observed 

 that when rabbits were injected intravenously with cultivations of the 

 jB. phlei, Grass bacillus II., and Butter bacillus, certain peculiar struc- 

 tures were occasionally present in the resulting lesions. The animals 

 were killed in from 1'2 to 15 days after inoculation, and at the post- 

 mortem a variable number of yellowish-grey spherical nodules were 

 detected in the kidneys, not elevated above the surface, but intimately 

 connected with the capsule, and only rarely extending from the surface 

 of the kidney into its cortex. Occasionally nodules were found in the 

 lungs almost indistinguishable from genuine miliary tubercles. Micro- 

 scopically ihey were indistinctly rosette-shaped, and had a structure 

 suggestive of mycelium. Stained by Gram's method or with hot carbol- 

 fuchsin, and subsequently decolorised with alcohol containing 5 p.c. 

 acetic acid, preparations were obtained showing mycelium similar to 

 that produced by Actinomyces. Occasionally areas were encountered 

 containing longer and shorter beaded threads matted together, which 

 more nearly approached the appearance of B. tuberculosis in artificial 

 culture, and the authors state that this mycelial development is a con- 

 stant accompaniment of the growth of the organism in tissues, and they 

 consider the short beaded rods to be usually merely fragments of the 

 longer, convoluted, clubbed, mycelial threads. Occasionally they ob- 

 served mycelium in which only a very few hyphae could be stained. In 

 this connection the authors cannot say with certainty that branching 

 forms have yet been observed. 



Etiology of Acute Dysentery.f — Vedder and Duval investigated 

 several outbreaks of dysentery occurring in the Eastern States of 

 America in asylums and almshouses. From all their cases they isolated 

 a non-motile bacillus, which was indistinguishable from the Shiga- 

 Kruse-Flexner bacillus. They further note that the B. dysenterise does 

 not develop so rapidly in plate cultivations as the B. coli communis. In 

 making agglutination tests the authors find that positive reactions are 

 not obtained simultaneously with the appearance of clinical symptoms ; 

 again, after having been demonstrated, agglutinins sometimes disappear 

 from the blood with startling rapidity. They conclude that sporadic 

 and institutional dysentery are both due to the same organism, which 

 is itself identical with that responsible for the production of acute 

 epidemic dysentery — the B. dysenterise of Shiga. 



Resistance of the Bacillus dysenterise to Cold.J — G. Schmidt, in 

 an attempt to explain the recrudescence of epidemics of dysentery in con- 



• Centralbl. Bakt, l te Abt., xxxi. (1902) pp. 547-50. 



t Tom. cit., pp. 134-5. J Tom. cit., pp. 522-4. 



