196 MICRO-ORGANISMS AND DISEASE. 



altogether absent. The longer the examination is delayed, 

 of course within certain limits, the more likely are "the 

 comma-bacilli found numerously in the flakes, but not to the 

 exclusion of other bacteria. They are generally absent from 

 the mucous membrane itself inclusive of the epithelium of the 

 surface loosened but not detached. No organisms of any kind 

 are found in the tissue of the intestine, in the blood, and 

 other tissues ; putrefactive bacteria, including comma-bacilli, 



FlGS. E AND F. 



Pure cultivation of choleraic comma-bacilli in gelatinc-peptone-broth. The 

 two tubes had been inoculated at the same time with the same comma- 

 bacilli, and were kept under precisely the same conditions. In both the 

 surface of growth is marked by a depression. At the bottom of the prowth 

 is a whitish precipitate of masses of comma-bacilli. The rest of the channel 

 is filled with almost clear liquefied gelatine. 



are capable of growing after death into the clefts and spaces of 

 the intestinal wall from the internal cavity. 



The mucus-flakes of the small intestine, taken from a typical 

 rapidly fatal case immediately after death, contain, besides 

 detached epithelial -eel Is, numbers of lymph corpuscles, some 

 perfect, others swollen up and disintegrating. Soon after death 

 all disintegrate. These lymph-corpuscles or mucus-corpuscles 

 contain, in varying numbers within their protoplasm, straight 

 minute bacilli much smaller than the comma-bacilli, being 

 only half or a fourth their length, and more or less pointed. 



