50 DR. E. KLEIN. 



several failures. The reason lies in the peculiar way the bacilli 

 are distributed in the blood fluid, being now most of them col- 

 lected in masses, owing to being held together by a granular, 

 imperfectly coagulated ii brine. Dipping the point of a needle 

 into the blood, it may chance that the point of the needle does 

 not take up one of these coagula, they being sometimes large 

 and far between, and in this case the inoculation will be un- 

 successful. A similar connection, i. e. the aggregation of the 

 bacilli by granular coagula, may be also observed in guinea- 

 pigs and rabbits some time after death, but not to such an 

 extent as in mice. I well remember to have been rather 

 puzzled one day about the inexplicable cause of death of four 

 of my mice that had been inoculated with anthrax, but appa- 

 rently did not show any bacilli in the blood. The animals had 

 been dead for some hours (less than twenty), and specimens of 

 blood of the jugular vein and heart withdrawn with a capillary 

 pipette, and used for microscopic preparations, did not reveal 

 the presence of the bacilli. I then made specimens of the tissue 

 of the spleen, which organ was only slightly enlarged, and found 

 it teeming with the characteristic anthrax bacilli. I examined 

 the blood again, and especially collected from the cavity of the 

 heart blood with the blade of the knife, so as to get out not only 

 fluid blood, but coagula as well, and then I met a number of 

 large coagula crowded with the bacilli. These peculiarities, in 

 fact, account for several cases in which I thought at first to 

 have to deal with animals refractory against anthrax ; but on 

 inoculating them again with guinea-pig's blood containing uni- 

 formly distributed bacilli they all succumbed. The older the 

 blood, and the longer it has remained within the body of the 

 dead animal, the less chance there is of its retaining the bacilli 

 in a living condition, and the greater also the chances of these 

 bacilli having disappeared and other saprogenic bacilli having 

 made their appearance. These points have been well ascer- 

 tained by Koch, and I can fully confirm them. I shall have to 

 return to this point in a later report, in which I shall give the 

 results of a systematical inquiry into this death of the bacilli 

 in the organs of an animal dead of anthrax. In some instances 



