E. Hindle 
127 
NOTE ON THE FOREGOING COMMUNICATION 
BY DR ANDREW BALFOUR. 
By E. hindle, Pei.D. 
I am extremely sorry that Dr Balfour should think that I have 
overlooked his important papers on the subject of the development of 
S. gallmarum; 1 can only say that this was not the case. At the head of 
my paper, I distinctly stated that it was only a Preliminary Note, and as 
such I avoided any discussion of the subject from an historical point of 
view. Had I done so it would have been necessary to refer to the work 
of Marchoux, Dutton and Todd, Markham Carter, and other investigators 
who have advanced our knowledge of the morphology of blood spiro- 
chaetes. In the paper under discussion I merely wished to state some 
of the conclusions I had come to on this subject as a result of my own 
researches and the complete account was reserved until I had finished 
further work on the nature of this parasite and its life-cycle; in the 
future paper full reference will be given to all previous publications. 
Through the kindness of Dr Balfour, whom I should like to take 
the opportunity of thanking for his courtesy, I have been enabled to 
examine some slides of the “intra-corpuscular bodies” described by him 
and considered as a stage in the life-cycle of 8. gallinarum. I find that 
I was mistaken in supposing them to be the result of nuclear degenera¬ 
tion of the red cells, for they differ from any of the appearances presented 
by the blood of normal fowls. When I wrote my Preliminary Note, 
the Fourth Report of the Wellcome Research Laboratories had not yet 
been published and therefore I had not had the opportunity of seeing 
Dr Balfour’s later work on the subject, in which he clearly distinguishes 
these bodies from any form of nuclear disintegration. 
Their true nature, however, is still uncertain, in spite of Dr Balfour’s 
very interesting results, both published and unpublished. A distinct 
cycle of development—schizogony, escape of schizonts, penetration of 
another corpuscle, etc.—seems to occur in the intra-corpuscular bodies 
and up to the present they have not been shown to develop either from, 
or into, spirochaetes. I have never seen these bodies in the blood 
of fowls infected with the Brazilian strain of .spirochaetosis, in spite 
of daily examinations of numerous birds extending over some months. 
The bodies are so very conspicuous that their presence could not be over¬ 
looked. I have not had time to decide the question, but the possibility 
of a mixed infection occurring in Africa does not appear to me to have 
been as yet excluded. 
