4 BULLETIN 880, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
allowance for the period which elapsed between the salting of the 
pork and its arrival m France, it is safe to conclude that 15 months 
of salt action 1s inadequate to destroy the vitality of encysted 
trichine. In the opinion of the present writers the results of 
Fourment’s experiment and his conclusion are so much at variance 
with the facts as other mvestigators have found them that his 
statements can not be accepted as proved by the evidence presented. 
According to Blanchard (1888), Benecke found trichine alive in 
a ham aad in a sausage which were kept in brine for 12 days and 
afterwards smoked. The examination for trichine was made 4 
and 9 months, respectively, after the above treatments. 
According to Stiles (1898), the parasites in trichinous pork are 
killed if the pork is kept four months in ‘‘pickling vats.” 
THE EXPERIMENTAL WORK. 
METHODS OF INVESTIGATION. 
Most of our investigational work was carried out in cooperation 
with certain meat-packing establishments in Chicago, which not 
only furnished the necessary facilities for the work but rendered 
useful assistance in many other ways. In arranging our investiga- 
tions we selected methods of preparing the various kinds of products, 
customarily eaten without cooking, from among the methods in com- 
mon use that seemed most likely to prove efficacious in destroying 
the vitality of trichine, and also devised other methods that seemed 
likely to be efficacious in destroying trichine and at the same 
time suited to practical requirements as to manufacture and 
commercial qualities of the product. These methods were tested 
by preparing from trichinous pork some of the products in ques- 
tion under the actual conditions of manufacture and then feeding 
the finished product to experiment animals to determine whether 
or not the trichine survived. Detailed records were kept of each 
step in the process of preparation, and each lot of product sub- 
jected to experiment was held under close supervision by employees 
of the bureau from the beginning to the end of the experiment. 
At first the pork used in the experiments was obtained from the 
carcasses of naturally infested hogs, carcasses being selected for 
use only if they showed at least a moderate degree of infestation. 
This involved the examination of many hundreds of carcasses, and 
~ proved unsatisfactory not only on this account but also because 
heavy infestations were extremely rare in small hogs. In the case 
of so-called Italian hams, which are usually obtained from rather 
small carcasses, this fact was of special importance. Ia order, 
therefore, to insure an adequate supply of trichinous carcasses of 
proper sizes for the experiments, the plan was finally adopted of 
artificially infecting hogs by feeding them trichmous pork. These 
