INVESTIGATIONS OF THE BE REA U OF ANIMAL INDUSTRY. 541 
came necessary to hurriedly prepare my report, and a culture 
supposed to be the same as that previously photographed 
was plated to determine its effect on gelatine. The gelatine' 
on this plate was liquefied, and on the strength of this one 
experiment the statement above referred to was made in the 
report. The error was afterwards discovered and corrected 
by me, but it is still referred to by unscrupulous writers as a 
reason why the micrococus of 1884 could not be identical 
with the micrococcus described in 1886 and in subsequent 
reports. 
A discussion of this question is of little importance at the 
present day, particularly when the one who made the investi¬ 
gations in question has since had the whole held worked over 
with all the appliances of modern science and has unreservedly 
published the results. These old reports which were made 
before exact bacteriological methods were introduced into 
this country, are only referred to now by those who wish to 
discredit the work of the Bureau ; but they forget that if it is 
impossible at this time to prove the conclusion that the micro¬ 
coccus of 1884 was identical with that of 1886, it is equally 
impossible for them to prove that the two were not identical. 
What is well-known to all of these writers is that under 
my direction the laboratory facilities of the Bureau were 
rapidly increased, that the work of experimentation was 
divided, that proper instruments were obtained, and that the 
results from that time to the present have been equal in accu¬ 
racy, detail and importance with those obtained in any other 
laboratory in the world during the same period. In the 
report for 1885 the microbe of hog cholera was accurately 
described and you may ransack the literature of the world for 
any description made previous to that time by which you can 
identify that germ. 
In the report for 1886 the germ of 'the American swine 
plague was described and the differences between this and the 
hog cholera germ were plainly indicated. In the report for 
1885 the disease investigated was referred to as swine plague, 
but before the following report appeared we received the 
report of Schiitz on Schweineseuche and also found that we 
