Miscellanea 
381 
respectively, the last being the piebald ; the three youngest are girls aged 4 years, 2 years, and 
9 months respectively. These last three children together with the piebald are given in Plate 
VIII. The grandparents were all "normal," i.e. not piebald. Plate VIII. suffices to show 
not only the difference in colour between father and mother, but the range of colour in the three 
daughters. 
As soon as I had seen M. Blanchard's account of this piebald boy I wrote to the District 
Commissioner, at El Cayo, Mr R. H. Franklin, and he most kindly sent me the fuller 
particulars here given, as well as arranged to have the family photographed for me. He tells 
me that the youngster is the pet of the place as well as its "curiosity" and that he is quite 
an intelligent boy. He was born on December 1st, 1904, at Peten in Guatemala and the reason 
his parents give for his piebaldism is " that owing to an eclipse of the moon on the night of his 
birth, he caught it in the head and it scattered over his body." There was no eclipse of the 
moon on that date nor any near it. 
One point further may be emphasised with regard to this boy. In our Monograph on 
Albinism, p. 248, Plate I (23) — (26), we deal with the case of a piebald boy from Papua and 
we give photographs taken at nine years interval. The dark patches have grown larger, but 
they have not increased in number nor in relative size. In the present case a careful com- 
parison of the dark patches on the legs and arms of this Honduras piebald boy in the recent 
photographs (Plates VIII. and IX.) of July 1912 and those of the Comte de Perigny of some four 
years earlier (Plates X. and XL), shows with almost absolute certainty that the relative area of 
dark pigmentation has considerably increased. This remarkable fact renders the boy of special 
interest, and it is to be hoped that in still later years photographs of him may be obtainable for 
comparison with the present series. 
IV. Selection and Intermediates in Bacillus coli. 
By LEONARD KEENE HIRSHBERG, M.A., M.D. 
In the course of some other work on a strain of Bacillus coli, taken from the rectum of a 
Scotch collie, and planted first in beef tea on October 5th, 1911, traiisjjlantations and agar plates 
were made of these organisms with the original purpose of studying what has been hitherto 
called involution forms. The course of this work directed my attention to the possibility of 
these forms being dependent upon the quantity and quality of the pabulum or nutrient material 
furnished to the bacteria, and hence these so-called involution forms being actually types of 
polymorphism. 
Incidentally observations were made, in view of the claims made by the biologists represented 
by Professor Castle of Harvard on the one side, and Professor H. S. Jennings on the other, along 
the lines of possibly selecting races of long, short, and various intermediate generations of this 
colon bacillus. If it had proved possible to select a type of long, intermediate, or short bacilli, 
that had remained within the limits of the select mode without reverting back or possessing the 
power to generate all the types, it would have strengthened the work of Professor Castle on such 
higher animals as rats, with their manifold and necessarily complexly interrelated factors. As it 
is, however, after making two hundred and twenty transplantations of colonies of this strain of 
organisms, and trying to generate true long, short, thin, narrow, and intermediate types for both 
length and thickness, I find at the conclusion of that part of the work that there is absolutely 
no ground in my experiments supporting selection as an element in generating a particular type 
of these bacteria. 
Placed in suitable nutrient media, at room temperature, these bacilli divide very rapidly by 
simple fission. From twenty minutes to half an hour is the average time of division, yet if we 
