5-1 
MEMOIR , S OF TEE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM. 
An interesting point in the epidemiology of the disease was put to me 
by Mr. Marshall, of the Queensland Museum scientific staff. He desired to know 
why fish, which were transported all the wav from Japan in the same water 
unchanged and therefore likely to be foul and heavily infected and survived 
this apparently unfavourable medium, died, as did many recently imported fish, 
when taken ashore and put in clean water of a composition assumed by 
experienced aquarists to be a suitable environment. The only explanation that 
I can offer is that the original tanks in which the fish -were transported 
contained bacteriophage in the water, as might very easily happen. In the 
event of another epidemic of this kind I propose to test this hypothesis 
experimentally. 
The above work is necessarily only preliminary, since the amount of 
material available was very scanty, and w r as done without access to much 
literature on the subject. 
The Medical Research Council 1 make a small passing reference to the 
fact that a cholera-like disease occurs in fish. 
T. P. Hughes 2 reports an exhaustive investigation of fowl cholera, and 
describes as constantly occurring a “ small pleomorphic, bipolar staining. Gram- 
negative, non-motile bacillus,” which rather resembles that which I have 
described in this instance. I read Hughes’s paper after I suspected this bacillus 
as having some causal relationship with the disease, and now feel that more 
material treated by more refined methods may enable me to solve the problem 
of etiology. — J.V.D. 
1 Med. Res. Council : “A System of Bacteriology,” 1929, vol. iv, p. 436. 
2 Hughes, T. P. : Jl. of Exptl. Medicine, 1930, 51, 225. 
