1 8 BACTERIA IN DAILY LIFE 



awaiting such a micro-organism may be gathered 

 from the fact that during the outbreak of plague 

 in Sydney the crusade against rats which followed 

 led to the slaughter in one year of over 100,000. 



The discoverer of this useful member of the 

 microbial community is Tssatschenko, of the 

 University of St. Petersburg, and in his memoir 

 he states that, whilst highly virulent as regards 

 rats, it is quite harmless to domestic animals of 

 various kinds. Thus cats, dogs, fowls, and pigeons 

 when fed with food infected with the bacillus 

 suffered no ill effects whatever, whilst its adminis- 

 tration in large quantities to farm stock, such as 

 horses, oxen, pigs, sheep, geese, and ducks, was 

 also without result ; hence its distribution, accord- 

 ing to its discoverer, offers no danger to other 

 animals. 



This idea of employing bacteria as execu- 

 tioners was not original, for Pasteur had already 

 in 1888 suggested to the Intercolonial Rabbit 

 Commission in Australia that chicken -cholera 

 microbes should be employed for destroying the 

 rabbits, which then, as now, are such a source 

 of difficulty and pecuniary loss to the country. 

 No active measures appear to have been taken, 

 however, to carry out this suggestion, one of the 

 principal objections raised being the undesira- 

 bility of introducing a disease which was at that 



