1888 - 89 .] Messrs Macleod and Milles on Asiatic Cholera. 23 
In several of these, comma-shaped organisms were seen on micro- 
scopic examination, hut never in any number, and in no single 
instance did cultivations on plates furnish such an organism. It 
has to be remembered that this material was subjected to the same 
process of examination as the cholera material, and also that there 
are few organisms more easily detected by plate cultivation than the 
comma bacillus. In a fluid containing comma bacilli alive, examina- 
tion by plate cultivations will detect them when microscopic examina- 
tion fails to do so. 
Other bacilli have been advanced from time to time as identical 
with the comma bacillus, hut on closer acquaintance their claims 
have been set aside. Tinkler’s and Prior’s “cholera nostras” bacillus 
and Deneke’s “ cheese ” bacillus are the only ones that have attracted 
much attention, but their characters of identity have also been found 
to be different from those of the comma bacillus, and it is not now 
necessary to particularise them. 
The latest claims of this kind have been put forth by Klein 
( Practitioner , March 1887, p. 182), who thinks that in two instances 
out of many he has succeeded in cultivating bacilli similar to those 
observed by T. E. Lewis, and which appear “to be in their manner 
of growth, in nutritive gelatine, strikingly similar to the choleraic 
comma bacilli.” He also describes a bacillus found in Noma as 
having similar properties. The characters given by Klein are, how- 
ever, not sufficient to identify either of these bacilli with that 
described by Koch. 
As regards the relation of the bacillus to the causation of the 
disease, it must be admitted that, if it is not in the body before the 
disease arises, it must either enter the body each time that the 
cholera poison does so, or originate spontaneously in the intestine of 
each case of the disease. Practically, therefore, this objection can 
only imply that the comma bacillus is already an inhabitant of the 
human bowel, but that it requires the choleraic process to demon- 
strate its presence there, since no one has yet succeeded in doing so 
apart from the disease. This is an objection with not an atom of 
proof, unless the following experiment adduced by Klein can be 
accepted as such. It is stated to be an analogous condition experi- 
mentally produced in an animal. His own words are — “That a 
pathological state of the intestine has a good deal to do with the 
