148 



THE AMERICAN MONTHLY 



[August, 



any competitor, excepting the glu- 

 cose man, and I hope and trust may 

 worry even him. 



[Many celebrated entomologists, es- 

 pecially Europeans, assert that the 

 tongue of the bee is solid and essen- 

 tially a " lapping " organ. Others, 

 with equal confidence, pronounce it a 

 " hollow sucking tube." Whatever 

 may be the true construction of the 

 tongue, one fact is certain and easy 

 of demonstration, viz. : bees both 

 suck and lap their food. To show 

 this, first attract the bees by exposing 

 some honey in an open vessel, and, 

 having secured their attention, re- 

 move the dish, and substitute in its 

 place a pane of glass with a single 

 small drop of honey, upon it. Invert 

 the glass so as to observe the bees 

 from the upper side. At first they 

 will be seen to insert the ends of their 

 tongues into the drop, and suck with 

 the pulsating motion of abdomen and 

 tongue referred to by Cook (p. ii8). 

 Then, as soon as the supply of honey 

 is so far exhausted that sucking is 

 impracticable, they may be readily 

 seen to lap up the remainder, whip- 

 ing their long tongues, fully exten- 

 ded, over the glass until every par- 

 ticle of it is secured. 



In Mr. Hyatt's article in the Quar- 

 terly he doubts that there is any con- 

 necting membrane, but that such a 

 membrane does really exist, may be 

 seen by killing a bee while in the 

 act of sucking, and carefully pressing 

 the thorax when the rod will be 

 thrown out, and the membrane dis- 

 closed to the naked eye. Owing to 

 its extreme thinness and delicacy, 

 however, it is next to impossible to 

 show it in a mounted specimen. Mr. 

 Folsom's section was made from the 

 tongue of a bee which died naturally 

 with the rod out, and required no 

 manipulation. — John D. White.] 



o 



BaciHus Anthracis. 



BY GEO. M. STERNBERG, SURGEON 

 U. S. ARMY. 



The excellent articles, by D. E. 

 Salomon, D. V. M., in the April 



and May numbers of the Microscopi^ 

 CAL Journal, have made your read^ 

 ers familiar with the nature of th^ 

 evidence upon which the claim i$ 

 based that the disease known as an- 

 thrax, or splenic fever (charbon of the 

 French, Miltzbrand of the Germans) 

 is due to the presence, and multH 

 plication in the body of an infectec 

 animal, of a minute vegetable para- 

 site, the Bacillus atithracis. 



Those papers will serve admirably| 

 as an introduction to the brief ac- 

 count, which I propose to give here,| 

 of a few experiments recently made. 



Not long ago Prof. J. Newell Mar- 

 tin, of Johns Hopkins University^ 

 kindly placed in my hands a smaUj 

 tube just received by him from Dr.| 

 Burden Sanderson, of London, to- 

 gether with a letter from Burdei 

 Sanderson, in which that gentlemai 

 says : '" I send you the material 

 started from in the last experiments 

 that I made on the subject " (an-^ 

 thrax). " It was then five years olc 

 and consequently is now seven oi 

 eight. I have no doubt that you wil 

 find that if worked up with salt-solu-i 

 tion and injected into a mouse, yoi^l 

 will have the spleen — after fror 

 twenty-four to twenty-six hours — en- 

 larged and infiltrated with Bacillus.'^ 



Soon after receiving this material, '. 

 captured a mouse (June 4th) an( 

 opened the tube (which did not con- 

 tain more than |- to ^ of a grain of 

 dried blood), rubbed up the enclosec 

 material with a little salt-solution^ 

 and injected a few minims of this^ 

 with a hypodermic syringe, beneatt 

 the skin of the little animal. 



In accordance with Burden San- 

 derson's prediction, the mouse diec 

 in a little less than thirty-six hours 

 and upon examing its spleen, an abun- 

 dance of rods were found, exactly re-3 

 sembling Bacillus anthracis^ as shown 

 in Koch's photographs from the 

 spleen of a mouse (Cohn's Beitrage, 

 Band II, Taf. XVI, Fig. 5). A por- 

 tion of the spleen was placed in a 

 culture-cell with a few drops of ster- 

 alized ch.\c\itn-bouillo?i and kept for 



