432 Mr. H. G. Plimmer. Note upon certain Organisms isolated 



treats only of the organisms derived from fruit infusions, and of their 

 effects upon animals. Most of their statements are doubted by the 

 German pathologists, including such a good observer as Baumgarten. 

 But, from my own experience, I do not find any reason to doubt any 

 of Sanfelice's statements; and I think that he deserves the greatest 

 credit for removing the study of the setiology of cancer from the 

 histological to the experimental region of work. 



On the Method of Isolation adopted. 



The cancer, from which the organisms I describe were isolated, 

 and with which my experiments have been made, was taken from 

 the breast of a woman, aged thirty-five years; it had a history of 

 only two months' duration, and it was growing rapidly at the time 

 of the operation. Immediately after removal, I examined a fresh 

 scraping, and, finding such an extraordinary number of the bodies 

 I have mentioned in the cells, I cut, with all possible precautions 

 against contamination, with a carefully sterilised knife, very thin 

 slices from the growth, which I placed with a little of the juice 

 scraped from the cut surface in a flask containing the following liquid, 

 which was of course carefully sterilised. This medium consisted of an 

 infusion made from cancer, just as the ordinary beef infusion is made, 

 to which was added, after careful neutralisation, 2 per cent, of glucose 

 and 1 per cent, of tartaric acid. This medium was the outcome of 

 many trials with all kinds of mixtures, and I tried it in this case as I 

 had already got similar organisms to grow in it from two previous 

 cases ; but they had no pathogenic properties, and this, I think, was 

 due to the omission of the next step. This medium, too, is particu- 

 larly useful, as hardly any bacteria, however hardy, will grow upon it. 



Then, remembering that in the body these organisms were under 

 anaerobic conditions, I exhausted the air from my flasks, and passed 

 hydrogen into them, finally sealing them up. This I have found is of 

 great importance as regards the maintenance of the virulence ; and I 

 find, consequently, that there is no falling off in the virulence of my 

 cultures, which are as active now as they were four months ago. Five 

 flasks were made in this way, but, in spite of precautions, two became 

 contaminated with moulds; in the other three, however, I got, after 

 from three to five days, a pure culture of the organism I describe, 

 and which has been kept growing in this and various other media 

 ever since. 



Morphology and Relation to Media. 



The organism is apparently a saccharomyces ; but I am informed 

 that, according to some authorities (such as De Bary, Cuboni, and 



