THE OLIVE TUBERCLE: CAUSE 395 



of his cultures, since he describes the olive-tubercle organism as 

 yellow on media, which it is not. According to Petri this yel- 

 low, capsulate, peritrichiate, liquefying bacillus (which he calls 

 Ascobacterium luteum Babes) splits olive oil, forming freely a 

 fatty acid, and is more tolerant of acids and of meat extract than 

 the olive-tubercle organism. 



There being nowhere in literature any proper description 

 of the olive-tubercle organism and in certain quarters much 

 scepticism as to the bacterial origin of the growth (vide Robert 

 Hartig's Lehrbuch, 1900, p. 211, and Alfred Fischer's Varies- 



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FIG. 303. Same series as Fig. 302. but further enlarged to show irregular bacterial 



fissures with water-soaked borders. 



ungen, 2 Aufl., 1903, p. 277), the writer undertook (in 1903) to 

 examine the whole question experimentally. For this purpose 

 olive tubercles were obtained from Genoa, Italy, and from Cali- 

 fornia, and cultures and inoculations in parallel series were in- 

 stituted, he results being: (1) repeated demonstration of the 

 pathogenicity of a particular organism; (2) the non-pathogenicity 

 of all the others, including the common yellow species of bacillus 

 and Schiff-Georgini's white species which was obtained from 

 Krai of Prague who had received it from Kornauth of Vienna 

 to whom it was given by Schiff-Georgini ; and (3) a description 



