A. Balfour 
55 
species of parasite. This would certainly seem to be the case in the 
species under discussion. I found that successful permanent prepara¬ 
tions of the vitally stained spores could be obtained by gently spreading 
out the fluid containing them on a slide and fixing by heat. The 
colour, however, soon faded. One would ask if it is possible that 
amoebulae of male sex might be derived from the crescentic spores and 
female amoebulae from the stout forms. There is no proof that this 
happens, but Minchin has suggested that sexual processes may take 
place between different amoebulae and it would be interesting to follow 
up this question. 
Some of the cysts were dipped into spirit, then flamed and trans¬ 
ferred to culture tubes of Nicoll’s blood agar; the cysts were then 
ruptured, thus seeding the medium with spores. I also made broth 
cultures in the same way but was unable to trace any development. 
Many of the spores seemed quite unchanged after 44 hours at room 
temperature (about 33° C.). Some became spherical in the broth, and 
thus obviously degenerated. The only point possibly worthy of note 
was that in both lots of cultures a number of small, hyaline spherical 
bodies were found, many of which contained a dark, motile granule. 
These bodies did not take on the vital stain and I could come to no 
decision regarding them, though perhaps they were very young spores 
or possibly even amoebulae derived from them. It was not possible 
to carry out any feeding experiments with this Sarcocystis gazellae 
n. sp. (?), as I propose to call this sarcosporidian, although in the light 
of recent work by v. Betegh and Dorcich (1912) this may not be justi¬ 
fiable, for their researches tend to show that possibly the same species 
of sarcocyst may occur in a number of different species of animals and 
even indifferently in birds and mammals. Owing to the small size of 
the cysts it would seem to be a different species from that found in 
Grant’s gazelle but this may not be the case. Ross does not appear to 
have given his parasite a name. Fig. 4 sho\vs a section of a ripe cyst 
embedded in the muscle fibres. The wall of the cyst is quite distinct 
from the surrounding muscle fibre, from which however, as stated 
by Fiebiger, it may have been derived. Crescentic or sickle-shaped 
spores are found throughout the whole of the cavity of this cyst. They 
are arranged in definite clusters following the outlines of the chambers 
formed by what Doflein terms the “ plasmareste.” At the periphery of 
the cyst may be seen large round and undifferentiated cells which are the 
pansporoblasts or mother cells. They are better shown in fig. 5 which 
represents part of a section stained by Heidenhain’s iron haematoxylin 
