F. J. Meggitt 
403 
with food and without; lemco of varying percentages and decayed 
vegetable matter being the food used. Every case gave a negative 
result and not a single living egg could be found. This result entirely 
contradicted the previous one. 
The brandlings used were of two distinct kinds, one having equal 
transverse bands of red and yellow, the other having the yellow bands 
only visible when the worm was stretched. The Rev. H. Friend, 
whom I questioned on the subject, was of the opinion that variations 
were due to differences in nutrition, but at the same time agreed that 
these variations might be sufficient to prevent both kinds of brandling 
.being liable to infection by the cysticercoids. 
The experiments were continued over a period of fourteen months 
and were thoroughly exhaustive. On the other hand, in the controls 
to the first series of experiments containing as many worms as the 
infection experiments, there were no infections at all so that the 
cysticercoids must have developed from the tapeworm eggs provided. 
Grassi and Rovelli (4) found in the brandling cysticercoids which 
they asserted to be those of Amoebotaenia sphenoides, basing their 
opinion upon comparisons of the hooks. This certainly confirms the 
first experimental results and shows that the eggs may develop inside 
the brandling. The hooks as figured by these investigators are rather 
open to suspicion however and they made no infection experiments to 
confirm this assertion. Also careful search in fields where infected 
poultry lived failed to reveal the presence of many brandlings, very 
often not one was found, and to account for the heavy infection they 
should have been present in large numbers. It seems likely therefore 
that in addition to the brandling some allied species of earthworm is the 
intermediate host. 
In parenthesis a curious case of poisoning may here be recorded. On 
dissecting a fowl it was found to be so heavily infected that many more 
than the usual quantity of proglottides could be placed with the worms. 
Altogether four cultures were set up, three containing 10 brandlings 
and 50 whole strobilae each, the fourth having only 6 brandlings and 
15 strobilae. Three days later when the cultures were examined it 
was found that in the first three experiments the majority of the worms 
were dead and much decayed, showing that they must have been dead 
at least a day: the fourth culture was all right. The survivors were 
removed, washed in water, and placed in fresh dishes and clean blotting 
paper: three days later they were dead. On the other hand, the worms 
from the fourth culture were entirely healthy when they were killed. 
