33 
only vesicles of the poison are the ejecta from the bowels of an 
infected person. Contagium in the form of a living organism 
could not be expected to produce infection at once, and the theory 
that it is organised is prima facie justified by the circumstance 
that a period elapses between the reception of the contagium and 
the manifestation of the disease (the period of incubation) during 
which the poisom lies dormant, but is in reality ripening towards 
an active condition. According to Dr. Klein no other view of the 
poison affords any explanation of the incubation period. No one 
had hitherto succeeded in pointing out any specific organic form 
as the probable cause of enteric fever. Dr. Klein discovered in the 
stools of patients suffering from enteric fever numerous bright, 
highly refractive, spherical, micrococci, of varying size, both 
solitary and in chains or necklaces, and at times rod-like structures 
from which these micrococci could be traced to originate. He 
traced these not only in the stools, but also in abundance in the 
mucous membrane of the bowel (the ileum) in the stages pro- 
ceeding ulceration. In these parts of the ileum which at the 
commencement of enteric fever appear to the unaided eye only to 
be slightly increased in thickness, Lieberkuhn’s crypts are seen 
to contain, in smaller or larger masses, corpuscles of a greenish 
yellow colour, highly refractive, varying in form and also in size 
from about twice the size of a human blood corpuscule to that of 
@ minute granule; and it is evident, from the appearances they at 
times present, that they multiply by transverse division from their 
character. Dr. Klein concludes that they must be of the nature 
of vegetable organisms, and that we have. to do with a fungus 
which possesses mycelium threads of very unequal joints. In some 
parts of these threads—probably the terminal parts—their contents 
split into macro-gonidia and micro-gonidia, and the gonidia, when 
discharged, undergo rapid division so as to form a kind of zoogloea. 
Dr. Klein, therefore, identifies the contagium of enteric fever with 
alow form of. vegetable life. The fungus is not only found in 
Lieberkuhn’s follicles, but in the tissue of the mucous membrane 
near to Peyer’s glands, and the spores and micrococci find their way 
through Lieberkuhn’s follicles into the lymphatics and blood vessels, 
and even into the mesenteric glands. Dr. Klein remarks that the 
appearance presented by this organism corresponds closely with 
those described by Cohn as characteristic of the vegetation dis- 
covered by him in the well water in a district in Breslau, famous for 
enteric fever—the Crenothrix Polyspora. The discovery will prove 
of value in preventive rather than curative medicine. It confirms 
the view which was previously arrived at by nearly all sanitarians 
of experience, viz., enteric or typhoid fever is a specific infectious 
disease (as infectious in its way as small-pox), communicated to the 
healthy by a specific contagium contained in the ejecta from the 
