250 THE MICROSCOPE. 
corpuscles. Poulet’s monas termo bacterium termo, have nothing 
to do with pertussis, the Frenchman to the contrary notwithstanding. 
Burger’s rod-shaped bacillus were not proven by culture and in- 
oculation experiment to be what the discoverer claimed. The most 
recent pathological announcement is by Afanasieff, who discovered 
a microbe, somewhat like Friedlainder’s pneumonia bacillus. It is, 
however, shorter and thiner than the latter, and in gelatin does not 
form nail-shaped cultures, those which are produced having no 
hemispherical head. In potato culture it is also quite different. 
Afanasieff’s bacillus exhibits a remarkable degree of vitality; taken 
from dried cultures which have been kept for months, and appear- 
ing under the microscope to be more or less destroyed, it still is 
capable of producing fresh cultures. 
It appears in short rods ranging in length from 0.64 to 2.2 u, 
and is sometimes single, sometimesin twos, sometimes in clusters, 
and even in short chains running in the direction of the mucus. 
MISCELLANEOUS. 
Home-mape Apparatus.—The time required to get together an 
old-fashioned apparatus makes it utterly impossible for a teacher in 
a public school to use it. Again, the time required for the manipu-- 
lation of it in the class, causes the pupil’s mind to wander to other 
thoughts than that of the principle which is to be illustrated. Add 
to this the fact that home-made apparatus is so suggestive of sci- 
entific principles that, while the student is making it, his mind is 
constantly learning something new, and we have ground for the 
statement that home-made apparatus economizes time sufficiently to 
make it practicable to teach science experimentally in the public 
schools. 
Perhaps the chief argument in favor of home-made apparatus 
is what might be called the manual-training argument—. e., the 
argument of its educational value to the student who constructs it. 
It is always noticeable that the student who makes his own appara- 
tus is not only liable to get a better comprehension of the principles 
which it illustrates, but his mind is thereby stimulated to inquire 
into many kindred principles.—Prof. John F. Woodhull, in the 
Popular Science Monthly for August. 
“TERCENTENARY” OF THE Microscors.*—-The three hundredth 
anniversary of the invention of the microscope will be celebrated by 
* The British Medical Journal. 
