262 REPORT OF TflE COMMISSIONER OF AGRICULTURE. 



and an Abbe condenser to make a distinction, ami that even under such 

 favorable conditions some of the rods are more or less il beaded," the 

 reader will not feel so certain that they are undoubted rods a* is Dr. 

 Klein. 



The examination of the tissues of mice and rabbits which have died 

 after Inoculation with the more or less septic liquid of dead hogs can- 

 not .be accented as throwing any satisfactory light on so difficult a problem, 

 since others cannot fail to have the same doubts in regard to Dr. Klein's 

 experimental animals that this gentleman is so free to express in regard 

 to those of M. Pasteur. The question as to the organisms found in the 

 tissues of animals so susceptible to various forms of septicaemia as mice 

 and rabbits after they have been inoculated with morbid products from 

 hogs which have died of a disease in which local necrosis and gangrene 

 is not uncommon, is one which can only complicate the real issue with- 

 out in any sense elucidating it. Indeed, when Dr. Klein tells us that 

 he has " seen a good many pigs inoculated with culture of the bacterium 

 of swine fever, which beyond the swelling of the glands and beyond a 

 transitory rise of the body temperature on the second and third day, byone^ 

 or even two degrees C, showed no other signs," we have strong suspi- 

 cions that the slight trouble produced was of a septic nature rather than 

 a mild attack of the destructive swine plague. The period of incubation 

 in swine plague is much longer than that of septicaemia ; sometimes it is 

 three weeks ; generally it is from twelve days to two weeks, and it is only 

 by the use of enormous doses of virus that I have succeeded in reducing 

 it to four or five days ; and, therefore, when we are told that in these 

 mild attacks the period of incubation was but two or three days, and 

 that in at least one case there was a rise of temperature within twenty- 

 four hours {Ibid., p. 43), the appearances are certainly very much more 

 in favor of septicaemia than swine plague. Certain it is that in none of 

 my numerous inoculation experiments has there been a rise of temper- 

 ature within so short a time. As I write this I have just returned from 

 making &p08t mortem examination of a pig killed in the last stages of 

 the acute form of the disease 5 this was one of a lot of three inoculated 

 with a virus so virulent that not one of a considerable number of swine 

 that have been inoculated with it during the last three months has re- 

 covered. With so virulent a virus one would expect the incubation to 

 be at its shortest duration, and yet neither of these three showed any 

 appreciable signs of disease np to the twelfth day. All sickened at 

 about the same time, and to-day, the fifteenth day, all were so extremely 

 ill that the most careful prognosis would be death of all within forty- 

 eight hours. 



In animals which have died from the disease and on which a post- 

 mortem examination was not possible immediately after death, I have 

 also found bacilli in the peritoneal and plural effusion, and even in the 

 blood. A photograph of some of the peritoneal effusion dried on a 

 eover-glass at the time of the autopsy, and afterward stained and 

 mounted, shows these very plainly ; this photograph has been repro- 

 duced by the heliocaustic process and accompanies this report as Plate 

 XII. Xo doubt bacilli would also have been found in the solid tissues 

 of this animal; but these organisms were the result of changes which 

 occur either shortly before or after death, and have not been found 

 in any of the numerous animals which I have destroyed for examina- 

 tion when in the earlier stages of the disease. In such cases the peri- 

 toneal, the pleural, and the pericardial effusions, and usually the blood, 

 are found to contain motionless micrococci of the figure-of-eight form, 

 but often united in chains and various shaped clusters. 



