20 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
One of the authors of this inquiry found an appearance like that 
of endospore formation in actively growing cultivations in a neutral 
medium, kept for three days at 70° Fahr. 
These are clear, round or oval spots in stained bacilli, one spot in 
each individual organism of typical shape. They are to he seen also 
in spirilla, and in slowly growing cultivations, in involution or 
irregularly-shaped forms. The appearance is that seen in tubercle 
and leprosy bacilli, and usually associated with the presence of 
spores, hundreds being seen in a single field. After forty-eight 
hours’ drying, growth took place, hut after no longer interval. 
No conclusion has as yet been arrived at as to the nature of these 
spots, further than that they are not spore appearances. 
For rapid examination of a fluid containing the organism, a thin 
film spread and dried on a cover glass can be stained by a watery 
solution of fuchsin in a few seconds, washed with water, and while 
yet wet, explored with an oil immersion twelfth or objective of 
similar power. 
Part II. — In forty-four cases of cholera examined microscopically, 
and by plate and tube cultivations, the comma bacillus was found in 
forty. Of these thirty ended fatally, and in six of these examined 
after death the same organism was found. In one case examined 
by both observers there were numerous comma bacilli on the cover 
glass preparations of the stool, but not a single colony could be 
found on the plate cultivations, the stools having been mixed with 
carbolic acid when collected. The other three failures occurred with 
non-characteristic stools during the early part of the investigation. 
One drop taken from a typical stool during the stage of collapse, 
or of the contents of the ileum of a patient who had succumbed 
during the same stage, was, with few exceptions, sufficient to furnish 
demonstration of the organism by cultivation, and these exceptions 
disappeared on the examination of a second drop. From such a 
stool, recently passed, colonies were almost always present on the 
third plate, -which contained only one-three or four-thousandth part 
of the original drop. Later than the collapse stage, when the stool 
or bowel contents were no longer typical, but slimy, faecal, or even 
only opaque, without being either of the former, the difficulty of 
finding the organism was very great, and often it could not be found. 
The authors point out that possibly for this reason the English 
