314 BACTERIA IN THE SPUTA 



from their resisting the decolourising process has, in some instances, 

 been proved wrong. 



IV. —Consequently, there only remain, in support of the spe- 

 cificity of such bacteria, the results, more or less controverted, of 

 the methods of culture and inoculation. We shall speak by-and- 

 by about the methods of culture, having already touched on those 

 of inoculation ; but leaving, for the present, that question on one 

 side, we wish to deny that the hypothesis of the speciality of 

 bacteria, found in pathological sputa, is at all supported by the 

 general clinical facts, or even by the daily microscopical obser- 

 vation of the sputa. 



V. — The congeries of the buccal and nasal microbes, put 

 together, may be summed up to two hundred or three hundred 

 trillions of germs and elements in continual prolification. This 

 vegetation, either through its diffusion — (at least, in many species 

 of domestic animals) — or its constancy and abundance, assumes 

 the character of a true excluding vegetation, placed by nature at 

 the ingress of the digestive and air passages, to aid the former in 

 the digestion, and to defend the latter against the micro-organisms 

 of the external world. An identical vegetation adorns the egress 

 of the genito-urinary passages. Thence, it is not surprising if 

 bacteria reputed specific of the air-passages are found even in the 

 products of the genito-urinary passages, and vice versa : if, for 

 instance, incapsulated diplococci (pneumococci) are found in the 

 urethral mucus or in the spermatic fluid, and curved diplococci 

 {gonococci of Neisser, reputed specific forms of blennogenous virus) 

 are found, in their turn, in the sputa or in the middle ear. 



VI. — Whatever may be the physiological importance of Lep- 

 tothrix buccalis, it results from our observations that its degree of 

 organisation is far superior to what has been reputed hitherto. 

 Leptothrix does not only live as bacterium, bacillus, or filament ; 

 but it possesses real organs of reproduction by which it would 

 resemble fungi and dioecious algce^ with distinct sexes upon different 

 filaments or individuals. Its fertile filaments are at times engrafted, 

 with two or three roots, upon clods or firm substrata, and end in a 

 fructification. The ears constituting these fructifications, as long (in 

 pulmonitic sputum) as i/6th of a milHmetre, are formed of many 

 very minute sporules (so much so that 400 milliards of them hardly 



