BV JOSEPH LAUTERER, M.D. 7 



Oihsr (lisaases like pleuro pneumonia att ick only animals, and 

 are not intruding the human body at all, whereas some animals 

 are gifted with great immunity against human diseases as for 

 instance the horse enjoys immunity against Lofiier's bacillus of 

 diphtheria. 



Like in the human beings the fungi as generators of disease 

 have the amoeboids as their competitors in diseases of the 

 animals. The tick disease of Eastern Australia which has given 

 so much work to our renowned investigators, Mr. Pound and 

 Dr. Hunt, is the best known instance of a disorder caused by an 

 amoeboid, discovered in 1889 by Th. Smith, in Texas, and very 

 inappropriately named by him Pyrosoma bigeminum (as the 

 name Pyrosoma has already been taken by Savigny for a genus 

 of the Coelenteratae). 



Like the malaria of human beings it is not restricted to 

 swampy plains, or low-lying countries. According to the newest 

 informations obtained from my old home the cattle disease 

 called red-water occurring in the lilack Forest, and seen by me 

 many times is caused by the Pyrosoma, just in the same way as 

 the tick disease in Queensland. In many countries the disease is 

 complicated by the interference of an insect which acts as a kind of 

 inoculator, or commission agent of the sickness. In Germany 

 there are no ticks connected with it, but in the summer innumer- 

 able hosts of large stinging flies come out of their haunts at 

 eleven o'clock in the forenoon to suck the blood from cattle and 

 horses, so that nobody is able to keep them out of the stables at 

 that hour. With high elated tails they jump away from their 

 tormentors to seek the shadow, where only a few of the insects 

 follow them. Very likely these flies take the role of the Queens- 

 land and Texas ticks, and harbour the amoebae in iheir body to 

 transfer them or their sporules on new hosts. 



With all this knowledge on hand every thinking observer is 

 apt to refer an epidemic of any disease to the action of a con- 

 tagium animatum, of a living contagion or infection. Now, there 

 exists in Australia, in epidemics, a cattle disease called by stock 

 people the Kickets or Wobbles, a disease manifesting itself first 

 by a staggering gait, arched back and elevated tail, then showing 

 its progress by paresis or incomplete paralysis of the hind legs, 



