MOUNT ST. GOTHARD TUNNEL LABOURERS. 149 



the exhumed body, and moreover, the symptoms did not correspond 

 with those of Trichiniasis. It will scarcely be believed that in spite 

 of all this, the official reporter to the Government actually had the 

 boldness to affirm, in the title of the report, that the " Cornwall " 

 fever was " proved to be Trichinosis." As the subject had been 

 brought before Parliament on several occasions, I felt it to be fairly 

 within my prerogative to correct the error. Accordingly, in the 

 Times newspaper I was permitted to contradict the major conclu- 

 sion sought to be established by the Government report, and subse- 

 quently in the pages of the Sanitary Record I repeated the same 

 statement. It was this that brought the Lancet into the field, and 

 in the article entitled " Trichinosis and Trichinosis," directed against 

 myself, that journal sought to screen or modify the palpable error of 

 the Government reporter. The professional public at home having 

 thus been misled, the error did not stop here, for after a short in- 

 terval an American professional periodical followed suit, and quoted 

 the '' Cornwall " outbreak as a genuine instance of Trichinosis. 



Not less than half a dozen kinds of nematoid parasites have been 

 falsely relegated to the genus Trichina, and as if this fact were not 

 in itself sufficiently misleading, we have now to deal with a new set 

 of yet more grievous misconceptions. I do not stop here to indi- 

 cate again the probable source of the rhabditiform larval parasites 

 found in the " Cornwall " fever patients, but I may state that in 

 reply to a letter from Dr. Buchanan I suggested to him that the 

 new worm described in the Government report should be named 

 Rhahditis Cornwalli. It is questionable if they be not immature 

 examples of Rhahditis terricola. 



In the presence of so much confusion of terms, it may be desir- 

 able by-and-bye to catalogue the misnomenclatures of the genus 

 Trichina, but at present I will only refer to one of these in connec- 

 tion with the supposed disease. I allude to the error of Herr 

 Borell, who, in Virchow's Archiv for 1875, has permitted himself 

 to call the micro-filarial infection of crows a form of Trichiniasis ! 

 It is satisfactory to see that Dr. T. R. Lewis has recently exposed 

 the folly of this proceeding. It is needless to say that the 

 avian disorder would be more correctly designated Filariasis. It 

 is impossible to conjecture when the literary absurdities to which I 

 have alluded will cease ; but to those of us who are interested in the 

 advance of Helminthology it seems a waste of time to occupy oneself 

 in correcting misrepresentations. These errors are mostly incurred 

 by individuals who, though highly cultured, have no practical 



