No. 4.] CATTLE COMMISSIONERS' REPORT. 525 



group of cows with " moderate tuberculosis," aud had given uo result 

 by feeding test animals with meat from their carcasses, though meat 

 from one of the two had, upon inoculation, responded to the test. 



These were not the results to be expected from Dr. Martin's experi- 

 ments, if he were really using muscular tissue (with its usual con- 

 comitants, forming " meat substance " ) containing or not containing 

 tuberculous matter among the fibres. He would not have expected 

 to find himself repeatedly giving rise to tuberculous disease by the 

 use of material in which no tubercle could be detected by his ocular 

 tests. He might have expected, on the other hand, a more uniform 

 affirmative result when he was experimenting with the two cows 

 whose meat had shown to his eye aud his microscope evidence of 

 tuberculous matter ; though he might have explained a failure to get 

 such results by the small amount of tubercle discovered there. And 

 certainly he did not expect to get, if he was using only such tuber- 

 culous material as was present in the muscular tissue of his tweuty- 

 oue cows, the egregious irregularities which he observed in his feeding 

 and inoculation experiments. He was dealing with a quantity of 

 tuberculous matter supplied to him, not, he reasoned, from the mus- 

 cular tissues that he had proposed to investigate, but somehow from 

 the general carcass of the cow, and abundant in the matters he was 

 inoculating just as it happened to be abundant in the general carcass, 

 and insufficient in amount, until he came to the maximum amount in 

 the general carcass, to react to the test of feeding, though (with 

 smaller amounts in the carcass) he had sometimes got an answer to 

 the more delicate test of inoculation. 



Dr. Martin tried in vain to explain these unexpected results by a 

 hypothesis that he had overlooked some minute tubercles in the small 

 portions of meat that had been used by him in his feeding and inocu- 

 lation experiments. Even this hypothesis would not account for all 

 the observed facts. And he presently saw another consideration, 

 of a different nature, which he might not have sufficiently taken 

 into his account, — the operations, namely, of the slaughterer and 

 butcher. 



Dr. Martin was not, at this stage of his researches, experimenting 

 broadly about things in general taken from the carcass of au animal 

 after slaughter, but he was trying to learn the distribution of tubercle 

 in the body of the animal, in the hope of adding to our knowledge of 

 the conditions which might give to meat the quality of injuring the 

 consumer of the meat. Still, he was dealing with meat, as meat 

 would be sold by the butcher. He had already sought, by discrimi- 

 nating between " trimmed " and " untrimmed " meat, to estimate the 

 risk of including in his own specimens of meat the stuff which, for 



