"GROUSE DISEASE" 203 



During the period of the Inquiry all the birds that have passed through 

 the Committee's hands, have been examined as carefully as circumstances 

 allowed at the moment. Every bird, almost without exception, was dissected, 

 and the more important points were noted and tabulated, providing in this 

 way a very considerable mass of observations from which to deduce averages, 

 construct tables and curves, and so obtain information which had previously 

 been inaccessible.^ 



In addition to this, in the majority of the more interesting cases, parts 

 of the various organs, as well as the contents of the different portions of 

 the alimentary canal, were submitted to microscopic examination. The tissues 

 were hardened and cut, and a very large number of sections examined 

 microscopically, not by one member of the staff alone, but by a number 

 ■of workers qualified to give an opinion upon what they saw, so that 

 bit by bit a true reading of the observed facts was attained. 



One or two questions regarding Professor Klein's work were to some extent 

 settled by the bacteriological work which Dr Seligmann carried out in the first 

 two years of the Inquiry. Dr Seligmann, before resigning his position conclusions 

 as Bacteriologist to the Inquiry, on leaving for Ceylon in December by^i^'cterio- 

 1907, wrote an interim report of his work in which he gave his ^"Sists. 

 provisional conclusions. 



Dr. Cobbett and Dr. Graham Smith were then enlisted on behalf of the 

 bacteriological work, and their results are to be found in detail in chapter xii. 

 They came to a very definite conclusion as to the absence of pneumonia in the 

 birds which they examined " in a perfectly fresh condition, the lungs being 

 always pale pink in colour and free from congestion." They ascertained 

 that the redness of the mucosa of the cseca was obviously not a post-mortem 

 change. They concluded further that diseased birds as a rule have a very 

 large number of Trichostrongylus, whereas healthy birds may have but few, and 

 do not very often have a large number. They also came to the definite conclusion 

 that " ' Grouse Disease' is not an infection with those bacteria" which find their 

 way in limited numbers into the organs of birds which contain Ti-ichostrongylus. 



They have not been able to satisfy themselves that the bacilli which find 

 their way into the organs do much harm. Some harm no doubt they do ; 

 but how much they cannot say. 



1 A complete list of all birds examined, with a note of the principal lesions observed, is given in 

 Appendix B. 



