XC1. 



also with more or less success at many other places, including 

 the Roman Campagna. The Royal Society's Commission at 

 Malta have traced the origin of Malta fever to goats' milk, and 

 by preventive measures the cases have been reduced to 15 from 

 258 in the summer of 1905, and many other diseases of bacterial 

 origin are now more or less under control. In regard to animal 

 diseases of this nature, a valuable report has lately been pub- 

 lished on the results of an investigation ordered by the Board of 

 Agriculture in 1902 on two serious diseases of sheep, louping ill 

 and braxy, which caused at times great loss among them. 

 The bacilli have been discovered and effective means of 

 prevention indicated. It has been suspected, and is now 

 proved, that rats in India are subject to plague, which is 

 transmitted from one to another by fleas ; and that they are also 

 a great cause of its spread amongst human beings is strongly 

 evinced by the fact that, since a wholesale destruction of rats in 

 Mysore, that city has been practically free from plague, there 

 being only five deaths instead of 995 in the year before these 

 measures were taken. Further experiments have been made 

 with the Radiobes, which had been put forward as living 

 structures generated by the action of radium on gelatin, but 

 which had not been accepted as such by the scientific world. It 

 is found in the first place that it is not radium, but the barium 

 usually associated with it, which produces the effect on the 

 gelatin, and that pure gelatin is not affected unless it contains, 

 as is usually the case, some sulphuric acid. The so-called cells 

 appear to be formed round a precipitate of insoluble sulphate, 

 but show no trace of the division which takes place in the living 

 cell, though they may be kept in their original condition for 

 months by sealing down the covering glass. They are, there- 

 fore, merely a chemical product devoid of life. Before I leave 

 these lowest forms of life I should like to draw your 

 attention to an address given by Mr. J. J. Lister, F.R.S., as 

 President of the Zoological Section of the British Association, 

 containing many of his discoveries in relation to the Foramini- 

 fera, some of the most beautiful and interesting of those minute 



