COMMERCIAL EGGS IN" THE CENTRAL WEST. 21 



The contents of these dirty-shell e^gs listed in Table 7 are varied. 

 Some show definite signs of incubation; some are aged eggs, as 

 shown by shrinkage; some show weak whites, some settled yolks, 

 etc. Bacterially this series, as might be expected, is very divergent 

 in the number of organisms observed. Two eggs out of the 51 con- 

 tain millions of organisms per gram in both white and yolk ; 4 show 

 a count running into the thousands; 9 have more than a hundred 

 organisms per gram; and of the 36 remaining, 15, or 41.6 per cent, 

 are sterile. It is of great interest to observe that although so many 

 of these dirty shells were smeared with feces, which undoubtedly 

 contained B. coU, this organism was not once obtained in the body 

 of the egg, either in the white or in the yolk, and that it did not 

 appear in those eggs which had been wet is a still more striking 

 fact. This observation is in accordance with the work of Maurer.^ 



Sample 4083, with 3,100,000 organism.s in the white, had a stale 

 odor on opening and a stained shell, which looked as though it had 

 been wet. 



Sample 4128 had a very badly brown-stained shell, and though 

 the odor of the egg was good on opening, 72,000 organisms per 

 gram were found in the white. Sample 4137 showed 4,600 organ- 

 isms per gram in the white, which may, perhaps, be accounted for 

 by the stained shell. On the whole it is the stained shell which 

 seems most likely to be the offender, an opinion which is strength- 

 ened by the observation that where there is a count of any magni- 

 tude it is not only most commonly in the eggs having stained shells, 

 but the organisms are usually m'ore abundant in the white of the 

 egg than in the yolk, from which one might infer that the infection 

 is from the exterior. 



The nine samples, composed of more than one dirty-shell egg. vary 

 in bacterial content just as do the individual eggs. The chemical 

 analysis shows that the loosely bound nitrogen varies with the char- 

 acter of the egg, not with the quantity of dirt on the shells. Sample 

 4631, for instance, shows 0.0024 per cent of nitrogen and is described 

 as very stale, but it was not any dirtier than Sample 553, wherein 

 only 0.0013 per cent of nitrogen was obtained. 



If one may draw any conclusion from the findings set forth in 

 Table 7 it must be that the dirty shell, per se, is not a sufficient 

 ground on which to condemn an egg, though the odor of the egg 

 when opened should be carefully observed, especially if the shell 

 shows stains or other evidences of having been wet. 



1 Bacteriological Studies on Eggs. Kansas State Agricultural College Bui, 180, 1911. 



