SEA-FISHERIES LABORATORY. 451 



distribution and significance. It ought to be clearly 

 understood that public health practice, at the present 

 time, does not enable us to state with confidence that 

 any bacillus found in shell-fish or in sea-water or mud 

 can be identified with those living in the human 

 intestine and nowhere else, and must therefore have 

 proceeded from the human intestine. Let it be 

 granted that the B. coli of the domestic animals- is 

 indistinguishable from that of man : then it must be 

 shown that this (bovine, say) bacillus has the same 

 significance as the human one. That is, since enteric 

 fever is practically the only disease which the 

 epidemiologist has to consider in relation to shell-fish, 

 it must be shown that there is bovine enteric, and that 

 it may be communicated via pathogenic bacteria, drains, 

 sewers, estuarine water and shell-fish, to man. 



An examination of the literature will show that, 

 since the Report of the Sewage Commission in 1904, no 

 serious contribution to the bacteriology of sewage and 

 shell-fish and the normal human intestine — that is to say, 

 no contribution helpful to the fishery administrator or 

 epidemiologist — has been published by the public health 

 researchers, with one or two exceptions. I refer to the 

 papers of MacConkey and Clemensha in the Journal of 

 Hygiene, and to the book — "Bacteriology of Surface 

 Water in the Tropics " — of the latter investigator. In 

 these papers a really adequate attempt to investigate the 

 bacteriology of sewage organisms has been made, but 

 there is no indication that their results have affected 

 public health practice. Indeed the modicum of 

 bacteriological evidence regarded as necessary in 1904 

 for the identification of B. coli is now ajiparently too 

 great. 



The general method of analysis adopted in the 



