CEREBROSPINAL MENINGITIS (‘‘ FORAGE POISONING ’’). 5 
is also reported to have been found by Christiana in primary sporadic 
meningitis in the horse and in a goat. 
The remarkable part of all the above investigations is that each 
author considers his particular organism as the etiological factor of 
the disease, and the majority of these writers believe they have suc- 
ceeded in producing the disease in horses by the inoculation of these 
differing agents. Some of these positive results are readily explained 
by the large quantity of turbid fluid injected under the dura. The 
inoculation of 5 and 10 c. c. doses of a heavy emulsion of any organism 
is likely to produce an irritation, and the inflammation set up by 
such foreign material will necessarily produce exudation with ac- 
companying mechanical pressure, so that it 1s not surprising to read 
in the post-mortem notes of some of these cases that the meninges 
bulged through the opening on cutting through the bones of the skull. 
Schmidt, of Dresden, is of the opinion that the nature of the infec- 
tious principle is not settled, and believes that the cocci and dip- 
lococci which have been described as causative factors will in future 
be deprived of their pathogenic relationship. 
In two outbreaks of forage poisoning investigated by Moore, of 
Cornell, one gave negative results from a bacteriological standpoint, 
while in the other pure cultures of the colon bacillus were obtained 
from the brain. 
Grimm, working in Zwick’s laboratory in Berlin, isolated strepto- 
cocci from horses affected with head disease or staggers, which were 
not essentially different from the Borna streptococci of Ostertag. 
Owing to the regularity with which these cocci were taken from the 
brains of horses with “‘head disease’’—cocci which Grimm stated 
possessed slight, if any, properties necessary to make them causal 
factors of disease—the question arose whether the same microorgan- 
isms are not also found in the brains of healthy horses. Grimm ob- 
tained the heads of 10 horses which were killed at the Zoological 
Garden for the animals, and which were by examination found to be 
free from any indication of cerebrospinal meningitis. In the brains 
of these healthy horses he found cocci (staphylococci and strepto- 
cocci), although cultures were made within a few hours after death, 
and at least one strain has shown many similarities to the streptococcus 
found by Ostertag. 
These results of Grimm’s work are very similar to the results of the 
Bureau of Animal Industry. In horses which have died of forage 
poisoning it is not a difficult task to recover various forms of cocci; in 
fact, too many forms to make them all of etiological significance, while 
in those cases which have been killed in the late stages of the disease 
it is of common occurrence to have all the culture media inoculated 
with the various tissues remain sterile. On the other hand, we found 
micrococci, diplococci, streptococci, and staphylococci so frequently 
