PREVENTIVE INOCULATION 17. 
in the initial stages of active immunisation—to be after- 
wards followed by injections of the living cultures. 
Ferry’s vaccine should prove superior to others, if for no 
other reason than that it is polyvalent and polymicrobial, 
for the cocci contained may be expected to play an 
important role in protecting against the secondary com- 
plications with which they are so frequently proved to 
_ be associated. 
The whole question of preventive inoculation is so 
highly technical, and our present knowledge of it so 
uncertain—as applied to canine distemper—that I cannot 
close this section without deploring the fact that laymen 
and others insufficiently trained have access to these 
bacteriological products, and find it possible to experi- 
ment with animals unhindered; for without an inside 
knowledge of the work their conclusions can only mis- 
lead and further bewilder us. The trained pathologist 
and experienced practitioner are the only individuals 
who can adequately tackle the question with any hope of 
elucidating points about which we are still in the dark. 
5. With Attenuated Living Cultures—Chauveau's Vaccine. 
—At a meeting of the Académie des Sciences (reported 
in Veterinary Journal, 1901), M. Chauveau intimated that 
experiments had been made in his institute with the 
object of inoculating against distemper. He had, he said, 
by means of intravenous injection of microbes taken 
from the blood and organs of a guinea-pig which had 
died of acute septicaemia, produced a disease in dogs 
which was very like distemper. Believing he had ob- 
tained, if not the specific, at least a nearly related 
microbe, he had inoculated a lot of dogs against this 
microbe; further, he had found in dogs suffering from 
distemper the same microbe with all its morphological 
and biological qualities. He succeeded in producing 
immunity in the dog by subcutaneous injection of cul- 
