n8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the act of Congress of March 3, 1887, to make investigations in 

 Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba relating to the etiology and preven- 

 tion of yellow fever; by special request of the health officer of 

 the port of Xew York and the advisory committee of the New 

 York Chamber of Commerce as consulting bacteriologist to the 

 health officer of the port of New York in 1892; and he was 

 a delegate to the International Medical Congress in Moscow in 

 1897. 



Dr. Sternberg has contributed largely to the literature of sci- 

 entific medicine from the results of his observations and experi- 

 ments which he has made in these various spheres of duty. 



His most fruitful researches have been made in the field of 

 bacteriology and infectious diseases. He has enjoyed the rare 

 advantage in pursuing these studies of having the material for 

 his experiments close at hand in the course of his regular work, 

 and of watching, we might say habitually, the progress of such 

 diseases as yellow fever as it normally went on in the course of 

 Nature. Of the quality of his bacteriological work, the writer 

 of a biography in Eed Cross Notes, reprinted in the North American 

 Medical Review, goes so far as to say that " when the overzeal of 

 enthusiasts shall have passed away, and the story of bacteriology 

 in the nineteenth century is written up, it will probably be found 

 that the chief who brought light out of darkness was George M. 

 Sternberg. He was noted not so much for his brilliant discoveries, 

 but rather for his exact methods of investigation, for his clear 

 statements of the results of experimental data, for his enormous 

 labors toward the perfection and simplification of technique, and 

 finally for his services in the practical application of the truths 

 taught by the science. His early labors in bacteriology were made 

 with apparatus and under conditions that were crude enough." 

 His work in this department is certainly among the most important 

 that has been done. Its value has been freely acknowledged every- 

 where, it has given him a world-wide fame, and it has added to the 

 credit of American science. The reviewer in Nature (June 22, 

 1893) of his Manual of Bacteriology, which was published in 1892, 

 while a little disposed to criticise the fullness and large size of the 

 book, describes it as " the latest, the largest, and, let us add, the 

 most complete manual of bacteriology which has yet appeared in the 

 English language. The volume combines in itself not only an ac- 

 count of such facts as are already established in the science from a 

 morphological, chemical, and pathological point of view, discus- 

 sions on such abstruse subjects as susceptibility and immunity, and 

 also full details of the means by which these results have been ob- 

 tained, and practical directions for the carrying on of laboratory 



