54 REPORT ON TTTE DISEASES OF SILKWORMS IN INDIA 



in them very difficult. The futility of this farcical " application " 

 of Pasteur's method hardly required to be exposed, and its lack 

 of success certainly did not imply the failure of Pasteur's method 

 for that had never really been tried. 



As the subject of moth examination was rather a delicate one in 

 Bengal in the past I have been unable to trace exactly the history 

 of it, but it would seem that Mukerji's " adaptation " of Pasteur's 

 method held the field until about 1915 when Professor Lefroy 

 and Mr. Hutchinson visited Bengal and began to inquire into the 

 question of disease. Whether this caused the abandonment of 

 the above method of examination or not I do not know, but when 

 I visited the Bengal nurseries in 1920 the paper method was not in. 

 use so far as I saw, but in most nurseries the moths were being crushed 

 by mortar and pestle in the fashion recommended by Pasteur.. 

 As I have said before, examinations were not being well done, the 

 preparations made while I was watching being far too thick and the 

 crushing of the moths being very imperfect, partly no doubt on ac- 

 count of the softness of the body. It is highly probable that when 

 no one was watching the preparations were even thicker and the 

 crushing still less perfect. But strange to say, imperfect as the exa- 

 minations seemed to be, the results, as will be seen from the census 

 figures, have been wonderfully good. Now if reasonably good re- 

 sults have been got in a comparatively short space of time by a 

 very imperfect application of Pasteur's method, it speaks very highly 

 for it as a practical scheme In Mysore moth examination is also 

 done by crushing the moth in a mortar, but here the instruments 

 used are of the Italian type and much superior to those used in 

 Bengal. The preparations too were very much better made though 

 even here they were not ideal laboratory " smears." Either 

 potassium or sodium hydroxide in 2 or 5 per cent, solution is used 

 instead of plain water. 



A second method of moth examination has been advocated by 

 Hutchinson (1920), and it is in use at Berhampore Central Nursery 

 in Bengal. This is a modification of Pasteur's method for examina- 

 tions for flacherie, and consists in extracting the gut of the moth with 

 the small amount of surrounding tissues that may cling to it and 

 smearing that in a drop of water on a slide. It is claimed that this 

 method is capable of detecting lighter infections than the other, and 

 personally I much prefer it for ordinary laboratory examinations. 

 Thick, " messy " preparations are not got in this way and the 

 initial cost of mortars and pestles is avoided, the only cost being 

 rough cheap needles in wooden handles. But sericulture is a 

 commercial undertaking and not an academic experiment. Many 

 hundreds of moths have to be examined in a relatively short space 



