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inflamed, but that there was no sign of any infectious 

 disease, or that it died of enteritis " not of the con- 

 tagious (sic) form," * we then know that the gentle- 

 man making these statements is somewhat more rash 

 than discreet. 



A very good instance of how easy it may be to be 

 misled in this direction once occurred in my own 

 experience. In October, 1903, a certain person sent 

 me a couple of dead Canaries. On reference to my 

 casebook I find the following entry against the one 

 which I opened first : — " To the naked eye the organs 

 " all appear healthy, except that the spleen is very 

 " slightly enlarged, and that there are a few small 

 " cranial extravasations " (of blood). Now what 

 would — what could a man say about such a case who 

 relied only on what he could see with the unaided eye? 

 Under such circumstances he would naturally take no 

 serious account of the very trifling enlargement of 

 the spleen ; and would consider himself justified in 

 saying that the bird had died of apolexy, and in giving 

 the^owner what would really be very misleading advice, 

 laying of course great stress in the usual way on the 

 substitution of one seed for another in the dietary, and 

 saying nothing at all about isolation, disinfection, etc. 



But let us see what the microscope revealed in 

 this simple looking case. The next entry in 

 the case book runs:— "The spleen swarming with 

 the septic bacillus." Here then was the true ex- 

 planation ; the disease was acute septicaemia, and 

 the bird had died in almost the initial stages of it 

 before the existence of any marked macroscopic 

 manifestations, succumbing thus early either through 

 the extra virulence of the causative bacilli or else 

 through its own special lack of resistance. On 

 examining the other bird I found the same disease in 

 a more advanced stage, where indeed it would have 



* This I have actually seen from the pea of a veterinary surgeon. 



