SECTION II 



VEGETAL PARASITES 



CHAPTER XXXVI 

 SCHIZOMYCETES 



Preliminary — -Thallophyta — ^Schizomycetacea — Eubacteriales — Coccaceae — 

 Bacillaceae — Spirillaceae — Mycobacteriaceae — References. 



PRELIMINARY. 



In our previous editions we drew attention to the numerous text- 

 books and easily available works on bacteriology, which we decided 

 not to consider, and we hold to that view still; but we notice that the 

 works on this subject, as supplied to the student of medicine, are 

 perhaps somewhat lacking in systematic classification. 



To meet this need we have written the present chapter, which 

 merely considers those bacteria which are of importance from the 

 point of view of tropical medicine; and instead of giving descriptions 

 of their characters, these are merely indicated by tables. Hence 

 it should be used in conjunction with a good textbook on bacteri- 

 ology, in which the details with reference to the species can be found. 



It is well known that the nomenclature of the bacteria is in hope- 

 less confusion, but an International Botanical Congress was to have 

 been held in London in 1915, at which the medically important 

 nomenclature of the schizomycetes would have been considered, and 

 probably some such congress will take place after the war. 



In the meanwhile the reader can find the existing rules in ' Regies 

 Internationales de la Nomenclature Botanique,' published in Jena 

 in 1912 ; and we may perhaps be permitted to remind him that names 

 of orders should end in -ales, or suborders in -inece, and of families 

 in -acecB, while names of genera must be in the singular number and 

 written with a capital letter, and those of subgenera and sections should 

 resemble that of the genus. 



With regard to species, it is designated by a binomial name, the 

 first portion of which is the generic name, while the second portion 

 is the specific name, and is usually begun with a small and not a 

 capital letter, and is, further, of the nature of an adjective as a rule. 



It is difficult to say what should be taken as the standard for 

 bacterial nomenclature and classification, but it appears to us that 

 it is useless to go further back than Migula; in any case the reader 



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