72 BOTANICAL GAZETTE [JANUARY 
refused to submit anaerobic cultures to such drastic treatment as 
transatlantic shipment because of their fragility (48), and yet an 
anaerobic organism taken in muscle from a whale by NIELSEN 
(40) in 1888 responded satisfactorily to routine anaerobic technique 
in this laboratory in 1918, killing its guinea pig promptly and 
resembling exactly its original description! In the veterinary field 
VAN HEELSBERGEN (24) recently aligned himself with the German 
workers in human pathology. 
The alteration of scientific attitude brought about by the 
adherence to such a theory as this is most interesting. Things 
become so simple under such an explanation, many technical 
difficulties are eliminated, immunization of animals for therapeutic 
purposes is made easy, and the scientific world, from the point of 
view of these workers, is so much the better off. For, if anaerobes 
may be changed one into another, why bother about isolating them ? 
They will not stay pure. Anaerobic cultures from Central Europe 
that have found their way to this country are seldom pure, and 
frequently do not contain the type of organism for which they were 
named. If they contain a pathogen, two or three types may be 
isolated from the cultures, and these types behave consistently and 
do not do the queer things they were supposed to do by their first 
students. Central European anaerobic studies are struggling in 
the dark, the days of NAGELI and BILLRotH have returned, the 
land of Kocu (33), of GHon and Sacus (15), and of von HIBLER 
(30) has shifted from the careful work of older days, GHon himself 
(14) is converted to the new theories, and but a few constructive 
workers with abundant material have come out openly to combat 
them. Chief among these is ZEISSLER (51), a pupil of and coworker 
with FRAENKEL (6-11), who has always maintained that gas 
gangrene is due to various distinguishable anaerobic organisms. 
PFEIFFER and Bessav (41) and GAEHTGENS (13) clearly distinguish 
various types. Early in the period of the war ZAcHERL (50) and 
K6vEs (37) gave good descriptions of pure cultures of the vibrion 
‘ septique type of organism. 
As is to be expected, museum cultures from Central Europe are 
more badly mixed than any others. A collection of ten strains of 
anaerobes from KRAL’s in Vienna apparently did not contain a 
