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visible to tlie naked eye, and by their numbers destroying life. The following 

 letter from our excellent consul in Altona, Germany, speaks of the cases whicli 

 have attracted so much interest in Europe and America : 



" United States Consulate, Altona, 



" February 16, 1866. 



" Dear Sir : The very valuable monthly report of your department for No-. 

 vember is duly received. I have never received it for the months of January, 

 February, March, and September. Perhaps you will be good enough to let me 

 have these back numbers. 



" The cattle plague has not made its appearance in Holstein yet ; but another 

 and most dreadful disease has appeared in swine, called trichina. To give you 

 some idea of the nature of this singular disease, it is said to be by the medical 

 faculty a worm of infiuite smallness, ingenerated in the flesh, and whoever eats 

 of it in an uncooked state, as the Germans very commonly do, are seized of 

 pains in the body and stomach, and die in a few days, suffering intense agony. 

 This malady made its appearance at Hadersleben, a village in North Schleswig. 

 Some two hundred persons were taken suddenly sick in the village after eating 

 bacon bought at a small store. In a few days eighty of them died iu great 

 agony, as if from cramp in the stomach and bowels. A celebrated doctor of 

 medicine in Berlin, named Virchow, having seen accounts of these sudden and 

 terrible deaths in the newspapers, visited Hadersleben with a view to investi- 

 gate the affair. Being informed of their having eaten this bacon, segments of 

 it were submitted to a careful microscopic examination, and a worm called 

 tiichina was found in it in large numbers. A post-mortem examination was then 

 made of the bodies of the deceased, and trichiuaj were discovered in their 

 stomachs and flesh in the same proportions as found in the bacon they had 

 eaten. There is much written from day to day upon the subject in the Ger- 

 man newspapers, and such is the excitement here, nobody dares to eat bacon 

 until it has undergone a microscopic examination. 

 '' I remain yours, very truly, 



^ "N. MARSH. 



" Hon. Isaac Newton, 



" Commissioner of Agriculture^ 



The Gennan cases here spoken of gave so much notoriety to the disease, that 

 most persons believe it is a new complaint ; but this is not the case. It would 

 seem from the above account that some hogs, perhaps not more than one, had 

 trichina? in large quantities, and was sold out by a retail dealer to a large num- 

 ber of persons, most of whom eat pork either raw or so slightly cooked that the 

 worm is not destroyed. 



The following account of the trichina, so called from the Greek word tlirix, 

 meaning a hair, we take from "William Baird's Encyclopoidia of the Sciences, 

 published in 1858 : 



" Trichina, a genus of intestinal worms, the species of which are found para- 

 sitical in the muscles of human subjects, and some of the lower animals. Trichina 

 spiralis, the worm upon which the genus is founded, is very small, of a cylind- 

 rical form, narrowed towards the anterior end, obtuse and rounded posteriorly. 

 It is generally found spirally twisted upon itself, but when extended, measures 

 in length about yg-th to ^th of an inch, and about yg^jth to -g^oth of an inch in 

 diameter. The muscles of the trunk are the parts where these little creatures 

 are chiefly found, and they occur sometimes in very great numbers. They ap- 

 pear to be derived from the food, and can apparently be conununicated from one 



