INVESTIGATIONS OF THE BUREAU OF ANIMAL INDUSTRY. 695 
matic plates, such as adorn Billings’ report, then an exact 
conespondence might have been expected. In spite of the 
vai iations, however, the difference in staining between the 
hog-cholera and swine-plague germs is very apparent in our 
plates, and can be relied upon as exact. 
With organisms which vary in many of their characters 
to the extent which occurs in bacteria from slight changes in 
the conditions of life, it goes without saying that it requires 
skill to secure typical preparations, and even then such are 
not to be expected from all outbreaks. For that reason a 
safe diagnosis cannot be made from a single character, and 
above all is it unsafe and unscientific to reach positive conclu¬ 
sions from the simple microscopical inspection of a prepara¬ 
tion, the germs of which have been cultivated, stained, and 
mounted by another person. 
The examples of Billings’ recklessness in this respect, and 
of his discomfiture, are numerous and instructive. Dr. 
Shakespeare, previous to his appointment on the Commission 
of Inquiry, sent him a photograph of a certain micro-organ¬ 
ism, and inquired if it resembled the germ found by him in 
the swine-plague of Nebraska. Billings at once accepted it 
as identical with his swine-plague germ, showed it among his 
friends, and wrote it up in the newspapers as another proof 
of the correctness of his own conclusions and the incompe¬ 
tency of the Bureau, When the commission reached Lin¬ 
coln, the members were invited to meet a number of scientists 
and people connected with the university, and at this gather¬ 
ing Billings made an address. Among other things he made 
a strong point of the confirmation which his work had re¬ 
ceived from the investigations of Shakespeare, and exhibited 
the photograph as proof positive that the latter had isolated 
the same germ from hog-cholera which he himself claimed 
to be the cause of that disease. To no one was this greater 
news or more of a surprise than to Shakespeare himself, who 
was obliged in self-defense to explain that the germ in ques¬ 
tion was not obtained from a sick hog but from a person 
affected with some bowel disorder, and he had no reason to 
suppose it had any relation to any swine disease. 
