1887.] MICROSCOPICAL JOURNAL. 135 
likely to result in substantial benefit to them, provided it can be executed. 
Of the value of such demonstration there can bz no doubt, especially in the 
case of those who do not have the opportunities for work in the great labor- 
atories. The similar project of demonstrations before the American Society 
of Microscopists will be very profitable to those who can be present at the 
meeting. Of the ability of Mr. Doherty to conduct such demonstrations 
we are fully assured from the character of the work we have seen from his 
hands. The expense of such a project would not be excessive if distributed 
among a number of societies. 
NOTES. 
Mr. G. S.Woolman invited us to visit him at his place of business, No. 116 Fulton 
street, New York. We passed two or three hours in his establishment a few days ago 
very enjoyably. Mr. Woolman shows a larger stock of physical and mathematical 
instruments than microscopical, but he has a very great deal to interest one in the lat- 
ter department. We looked through objectives,examined the new Ryder microtome, 
looked at cabinets and slides. Among his slides were a large number of finely- 
mounted objects, prepared by the late Dr. Allen Y. Moore. He had, too, some his- 
toric slides, among them one of Beck’s original test slides of Rodura scales given him 
by the elder Mr. Beck in 1870. We saw also a case which Mr. Woolman is devising 
for packing his own microscope to carry around to club meetings, etc., which is very 
handsome and will be very useful. While there the enthusiastic Mr. Jay L. Smith, of 
Orange, New Jersey, dropped in, and we talked over the earthworm. Our visit at 116 
Fulton was a very pleasant one, and we have every inclination to repeat it. Mr. 
Woolman is a good friend of the microscope and its users. 
Origin of scarlet fever.—lIt is estimated by the London 7zmes that in the thirty years 
from 1850 to 1880 the number of deaths caused by scarlet fever in the United Kingdom 
was 543,000, and that the same disease causes more than 200,000 cases of illness in 
that country every year. The very successful experiments by which Mr. Power and 
Dr. Klein, of London, have shown how the disease is communicated to human beings 
from cows by the milk supply are of interest. 
The scarlet fever epidemic which was the subject of Mr. Power’s careful inquiry oc- 
curred in the north of London last winter, and the disease was confined exclusively 
(aside from cases of subsequent infection) to those who used milk supplied from one 
dairy farm in Hendon. It was clearly shown that the milk had not absorbed the con- 
tagion directly from human beings, and had not been contaminated by unsanitary sur- 
roundings. ‘The cows suffered from a disease very closely resembling scarlet fever, 
though milder in form, and it was this disease which had been communicated to those 
who drank the milk. In human beings it was scarlet fever, without a doubt. 
The manifestations of this disease in the cows were visceral lesions, sores on the 
skin, loss of hair in patches, and ulcers on the udder. These sores contained mi- 
crococci or microbes, and after calves had been inoculated with a cultivation of these 
microbes the same disease appeared in them at the end of an incubation period. 
The evidence was almost complete, but it was necessary to prove that scarlet 
fever in man was due to the presence and multiplication in the blood and tissues of 
the same microbe, and that the microbe obtained from human scarlet fever would 
cause in a cow the disease produced in healthy cows by the microbe taken from the 
cows at the Hendon farm. In a lecture recently delivered before the Royal Insti- 
tution in London Dr. Klein showed that the needed proof had been procured. In 
the blood and tissues of persons affected with scarlet fever a microbe identical in mi- 
croscopical and in cultural character with that obtained from the Hendon cows has 
been found. By repeated experiments it has been shown that the action of this mi- 
crobe upon cows and other animals is exactly the same as that of the microbe taken 
from the cows at Hendon. Calves and other animals were inoculated with culti- 
vations of each microbe (that taken from the human being and that obtained from 
the Hendon cows), and in each case there was developed the same cutaneous and 
