546 
D. E. SALMON. 
Two pages further on he says: 
“ With this, apparently, positive evidence in his hands, why 
did not Mr. Salmon proceed with such valuable work in 1886 
and 1887, not to speak of the present year? 
Why does he not mention any further experiments of 
the same kind in his report of 1886, or his later publications? 
11 What is he employed for but to do this thing? 
“ The true answer is easy to discover! 
Because Mr. Salmon is f ully aware that no such organism as 
his swine plague ‘ new microbe op 1885 , or his ‘hog cholera' of 
1886 ^ 87 and 88 , exists as an etiological moment in swine plague 
(L. c. p. 396.) j 
These extracts are certainly sufficient to demonstrate Bil¬ 
lings conclusion as to the germ of hog cholera up to the time 
his report was written in 1888. 
Was he right or wrong in his conclusion that no such germ 
as the hog cholera microbe existed, and that it had never been 
found and never would be found in the American swine dis¬ 
ease ? Is there any one in this Association, or, indeed, any 
one in the country, who believes that Billings was right and 
the Bureau wrong on this fundamental question? You all 
know better. You know that all who have since investigated 
the question have acknowledged the reality of the hog cholera 
microbe and its etiological relation to that disease. Even 
Billings himself has since adopted it, and in the September 
( 1 S9 2 ) number of th e Journal of Comparative Medicine he gives 
a figure of it, which does not correspond in the least with the j 
hgui es in his leport, or with his description of it as an ovoid, 
belted germ morphologically identical with the microbe of ' 
Schweineseuche . 
t I 
All the statements of his which I have quoted were, there- 
lore, ladically wrong so far as they denied the existence and 
the etiological relation of the hog cholera germ. Were they 
wrong as to the germ which he found at that time ? This 
question we will consider later, but it should be remarked 
here that Billings claims to be a bacteriologist, and that con¬ 
sequently he should be able to discriminate between two such 
radically different germs, especially after the points of differ- 
