THE MICROSCOPE. 19 
been resorted to’ with complete success. Mr. Knight, of Kozouzah, 
a large sheep-owner, treats his diseased flocks as follows: He drives 
a hundred or ‘more lambs into an air-tight room into which a con- 
stant current of air, previously passed under pressure through 
carbolic acid is forced. The strength used is stated to be one in 
ten, and the lambs are kept in the room for one or two hours at a 
time; it is said that most of them are thus cured at once. 
He assumes that Dr. Koch has demonstrated “to a certainty, 
that phthisis in man is due to the presence of an entozoon—the 
bacillus.” Therefore he would give the same treatment for phthisis 
in man as was so successfully used in his cases of parasitic 
bronchitis of lambs. He would expect “with the greatest con- 
fidence’’ that this treatment would be “equally successful.” 
Commenting on the above the editor of the Journal says: ‘No 
doubt it is highly probable that the bacillus does play some ré/e 
more or less important in the development of tuberculosis, but 
beyond this it seems at present impossible to go. It may, by its 
entrance into, and development in the tissues, be the direct de- 
termining cause of the lesions of tuberculosis; on the other hand, 
it may be concerned only in the final destructive process, assisting 
by its growth inthe disintegration and removal of the diseased 
tissues. Very much yet remains to be done before the exact im- 
portance of this bacillus can be appreciated. 
To compare a nematode worm an inch long with the bacillus 
tuberculosis, and to assume that what is beneficial to an animal 
infested with the one, must also cure an individual in which the 
other exists, is to make a very large assumption, which may or may 
not be true in this particular case, but is certainly a bad precedent.” 
In Austria, as well as in Germany and England, systemic efforts 
are being made to settle the questions as to the contagiousness and 
heredity of tuberculosis. A circular has been sent to eight thousand 
medical men in Austria, requesting them to give particulars of any 
cases which they consider to have proved the contagiousness of the 
disease, and also to give the particulars of cases of supposed 
heredity, and of any cases in which complete cure is believed to 
have been effected. The determined international effort which is 
being made to cope with this fell disease must be regarded as one 
of the results of Koch’s discovery of the bacillus tuberculosis. 
