136 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACADEMY OF [March, 



routine practice is now to boil droppings for five minutes in 10 per cent, 

 potassium hydroxide, shake one minute, boil three minutes, centrifuge 

 for one minute. Two portions of the sediment are examined for ova 

 under the f lens, one from the surface and one from the bottom. The 

 preparation of each specimen examined in lots of ten requires five 

 minutes. The examination under the lens requires ten minutes 

 , where no ova are present. When present they are detected usually 

 in less than one minute, although one case was diagnosed only after 

 eight minutes. The total time for examining one bird is thus fifteen 

 minutes. A mechanical stage is used and the entire wet specimen 

 is gone over. 



•With a view to decreasing the amount of debris, the birds have 

 been starved for twelve, in the case of smaller birds, or, in the 

 case of larger ones, twenty-four hours. The droppings are collected 

 during the subsequent twelve hours. That this is a necessary 

 procedure has been shown in subsequent examinations of these 

 same birds where they have not been starved. In every case the 

 eggs are more concentrated where the bird has l:een starved. This 

 was shown practically in the case of a green-cheeked amazon which 

 was passed as not verminous during our preliminary experiments 

 without starving, but detected after starving. 



Employing the method outhned above (for convenience called 

 "the improved method"), every bird in the parrot-house was exam- 

 ined. The birds were first moved to a separate building. The 

 parrot-house was then thoroughly fumigated with formaldehyde, 

 the cages galvanized and new stands erected. Birds whose drop- 

 pings showed ova were isolated in the infirmary. The others were 

 sent to the parrot-house. Those removed to the infirmary were 

 again examined by improved method without starving, to guard 

 against a possible clerical error by which the specimens might 

 have been mixed. 



As a result of the examination of all of our parrots, twenty were 

 detected and isolated (14 per cent.). These twenty birds have been 

 used for subsequent experimentation. Some, too, have been kept 

 in an open cage exposed to the weather. For these reasons it is 

 unfair to compare the mortality of these verminous birds with that 

 of the non-verminous at the parrot-house. If such a comparison 

 could be fairly made it would furnish valuable evidence regarding 

 the criminality of the worm, as discussed earlier in this paper. 



As these birds died they were posted, and in all cases the worms 

 were found in the proventricle. We have found that our technique 



