494 
W. L. WILLIAMS. 
tions which constitute the most stubbornly contested field in 
veterinary and medical sanitary science, having engaged the 
attention of sanitarians for years, and promising yet much 
controversy ere the questions are settled. Upon this class 
your committee has found it impossible to agree. This class 
includes, in our present state of knowledge, three diseases, or 
rather a form of three of the maladies enumerated under the 
second sub-class of class C. They are the chronic local, 
or perhaps more properly, latent form of glanders, tubercu¬ 
losis and actinomycosis. They have many characters in com¬ 
mon, so much so that we have been enabled only recently to 
differentiate them. Actinomycosis was long known in one 
form as glanders of cattle, in other forms as tubercular stoma¬ 
titis and tubercular enlargement of glands, while in man 
actinomycosis was known as a variety of tubercular affec¬ 
tion. All are peculiarly widely disseminated over the world, 
are in many cases exceedingly latent or passive, often dis¬ 
cernible only by post-mortem inspection, may exist in certain 
individuals for an almost indefinite time without inducing 
noticeable constitutional disturbances, and all having a predi¬ 
lection for the lungs and lymphatic glands ; again their admis¬ 
sion to the animal economy may effect their extension largely 
through these. The micro-organisms are highly gregarious 
in their habits, and have a great tendency to become encysted 
in vari-sized cysts with fibrous or fibro-calcareous walls. This 
encystment renders the enclosed micro-organisms passive, or 
rather in many cases they retrograde and even perish, and 
thus in all cases, through this "encysting process, a large por¬ 
tion of the bacilli, sometimes, so far as we can discern, all of 
them, become so encysted and render the affection wholly 
latent, and later these bacilli may largely or wholly perish and 
recovery of the animal follow, and in two, if not all three dis¬ 
eases, with immunity from future attacks. 
All are transmissible to a wide variety of animals, and the 
micro-organisms thrive in vegetable media. In a healthy an¬ 
imal the digestive processes are usually fatal to the etiologi¬ 
cal moment. 
The transmissibility of glanders to man, and the danger- 
