CH. ix.] OTHER BACTERIA IN CHOLERA. 167 



They can be found also amongst the flakes of the rice-water 

 stools, provided these are quite fresh, but then they are ob- 

 tained only in a fragmentary state. But the sooner the 

 post-mortem examination is made the more numerously they 

 are found in those glassy clumps. Lewis and Cunningham 

 in their reports on cholera have noticed them, and they 

 correctly state that in order to see them the material must 

 be fresh, i.e. examined very soon after death. One misses 

 any mention of them in Koch's paper, whether it be that his 

 attention was chiefly or wholly directed to the comma-bacilli, 

 or, what seems more probable, his dissections were not made 

 sufficiently soon after death. That this is the more likely ex- 

 planation appears from the fact that when stained with ani- 

 line dyes many of these corpuscles contain some interesting 

 things, as will appear presently ; and had those corpuscles 

 been present in Koch's specimens he could not have failed 

 to notice their contents. Examining these mucous corpuscles 

 in preparations dried (after the Weigert-Koch method in thin 

 layers) and stained with gentian-violet, or Spiller's purple, or 

 methyl-blue, they present themselves as spherical, oval, or 

 irregular corpuscles of about the diameter of ordinary white 

 blood corpuscles, or larger, if swollen up. Each contains two 

 or three deeply-tinted oval, spherical, or angular nuclei. 

 Their protoplasm is more or less hyaline, and they vary in 

 size, inasmuch as many of them show signs of being swollen 

 up or are even in the act of disintegration, as is indicated by 

 their faint or broken outline respectively. The best preserved 

 spherical corpuscles are completely filled with very minute 

 straight bacilli. Those that are slightly swollen show the 

 bacilli more isolated, but still in many places in groups, and 

 in those that are much swollen up and at the point of disin- 

 tegration the bacilli are seen very loosely and irregularly 

 scattered through the protoplasm or on the point of leaving 



