158 THE GROUSE IN HEALTH AND IN DISEASE 



The foregoing resume is necessary in order to show the 

 position of the controversy when the Committee of Inquiry 

 was beginning its work. It explains many of the unavoidable 

 errors into which the Committee was led by the inaccuracy of 

 much that had been published on the subject. Even Professor 

 Klein's work, accurate and painstaking as it was, and clear 

 as were his published descriptions of whatever he himself 

 saw, was misinterpreted by him for the sole reason that 

 bacteriology (a science of which he was one of the most 

 honoured founders) was still in its infancy. His deductions 

 as to the disease being an acute infectious pneumonia due 

 to a specific bacillus have now been shown to be founded 

 upon a misconception ; but, in the days when he was 

 working at the subject, no one could h&ve arrived at 

 other conclusions than those to which he himself came. It 

 is due to so great and careful a worker to say that at that 

 time he was years ahead of any other bacteriologist in this 

 country. That he should since have been found to be in error 

 merely shows how dependent is science upon the methods avail- 

 able at the moment, and how impossible it is for any one at 

 any time to be certain that even the most probable explanation 

 of observed facts is the right one. 



The doubts of the Committee were confirmed when their 

 bacteriologist, Dr Seligmann, found that the bacillus which 

 Professor Klein considered to be the specific cause of Grouse 

 pneumonia was in fact only to be discovered in the lungs 

 some twelve to twenty-four hours after death. It became 

 gradually clear that not only the grosser appearances in the 

 lung which Klein considered to be due to pneumonic con- 

 gestion, but the microscopic appearances of the lung-tissue 

 in section, as well as the colonies of bacilli which he 

 described and figured in the lung, were in fact only to be 

 found some hours or days after the death of the bird. They 

 were undoubtedly due to a post-mortem migration into, 

 and colonisation of, the tissues in question by numbers of 

 Bacillus coli which had escaped from their proper sphere in 



