38 THE MICROSCOPE. 



eighteen specimensjourteen were made principally from glucose, while 

 much of the red current jelly sold in Paris is made without currants, the 

 jelly being obtained by the use of sea-weed, the color with fuchine, 

 and the flavor with an essence made from acetic, tartaric, and other 

 acids. Even bread, the consumption of which in France is es- 

 timated at sixteen thousand tons a day, is very much adulterated in 

 Paris by dampening the flour so as to increase its weight, mixing it 

 with bean-meal, potato starch, etc., or adding to it deleterious com- 

 pounds of lead, copper, zinc, sulphate of lime, and chalk. Out of 

 thirty-one specimens of bread analyzed, only thirteen were made of 

 pure wheat flour; and in examining the composition of flour, the 

 spectrum analysis has been found of great assistance as the presence 

 of chemical components can be detected at once. Butter is even 

 more generally adulterated than bread; for out of sixty-two samples 

 only eleven were pure. When one remembers that the margarine 

 manufactured in New York is equivalent to the quantity of butter 

 which could be made from the milk of three hundred thousand 

 cows, and, that whole ship-loads of it are exported from Holland to 

 Normandy, and send thence to Paris as "best Normandy butter, it 

 will be easy to understand why the report of the analysis is so un- 

 favorable." — Herald of Health. 



Dr. Schmidt and the Tubercle Bacillus. — Dr. H. D. 

 Schmidt, a pathologist of New Orleans, has recently appeared in an 

 article in the Chicago Melical Journal and Examiner in which he 



strongly combats the views of Koch on the tubercle bacillus. Dr. 

 Schmidt's qualification having been vouched for by respectable 

 authority, his article is being regarded by some of our exchanges as 

 an overthrow of the theory which has won fame for Koch. The 

 pathologist on the staff of the Maryland Medical Journal, Dr. 

 Councilman, is, however, not one of those who have been carried 

 away by Dr. Schmidt's charge, and in his issue of the ist instant 

 he undertakes to show that the New Orleans pathologist is an 

 incompetent. He pronounces the article in question "so full of 

 microscopic impossibilities that were it not for the fact that such 

 statements as his were calculated to do harm to a few members of 

 the profession who had not time or opportunity to acquaint them- 

 selves with the rudiments of modern microscopic research in lower 

 organisms," he should not notice it. Dr. Schmidt having declared 



