E. Hindle 
469 
important to note that Balfour’s figures show that these bodies have 
exactly the same staining reaction as the nucleus of the red cell, and, 
moreover, are identical in appearance with the products of undoubted 
nuclear degeneration seen in normal fowls. 
This nuclear degeneration seems to be a special feature of the fowl 
spirochaetosis occurring in the Sudan and in South Africa (Jowett), for 
it only rarely occurs in the blood of fowls infected with the strains of 
this disease from Brazil and Algeria respectively. With these latter 
strains of spirochaetosis the infected bird usually dies at the height 
of infection, or else recovers, and the infection rarely assumes the chronic 
form, necessary for the production of abundant nuclear degeneration of 
the red cells. 
TJie spirochaete in the tick. 
After being taken into the tick, some of the spirochaetes penetrate 
the wall of the gut and appear in the coelomic fluid. The time which 
elapses between the ingestion of the parasites and their appearance in 
the coelomic fluid varies from 2 hours to as long as 48 hours and, 
moreover, their appearance is by no means constant, for in some cases 
we have never seen any spirochaetes in the coelomic fluid, although the 
tick was examined at intervals for four days after having fed on an 
infected fowl. Usually the parasites only remain in the coelomic fluid 
a short time, as they bore their way into the salivary glands and gonads 
of the tick within a few hours. 
As a result we have found numerous spirochaetes in the salivary 
glands and ovary, respectively, of a tick that had fed on an infected bird 
6 hours previously. As this tick had been kept at a uniform tempera¬ 
ture of 28° C. for at least three months previously, the spirochaetes in 
these organs must have come from the gut. Contamination during the 
dissection certainly did nor occur in this case, for the preparations show 
a complete absence of any of the characteristic gut-contents. 
The spirochaetes in these organs and also in the Malpighian tubules 
bore their way into the cells (Diagram A), and after becoming more or 
less coiled up, often producing cyst-like forms, segment into a number 
of “ coccoid bodies.” These intracellular coccoid bodies multiply by 
transverse fission, especially in the cells of the Malpighian tubules and 
the ovary. As a rule they soon disappear from the salivary glands and 
therefore it seems probable that, as in the case of 0. moubata (Leishman, 
1910; Hindle, 1911), these organs are not usually responsible for the 
