58 
FRANK S. BILLINGS. 
vaccine, and I must express my surprise that, with the unusnal 
advantages the latter has enjoyed for such experimentation, that 
Dr. Law has not long since pushed this work to its definite con¬ 
clusion. I will simply say that we have confirmed these conclu¬ 
sions in Nebraska, as will be shown when I find time to write a 
paper upon this part of the subject, in which I shall give full 
credit to the work of Messrs. Law and Detmers. We will now 
turn our attention to the point in question —the etiological moment 
in American swine plague. 
The first investigations upon this important question were 
made in England by Dr. Klein in 1876, but resulted in nothing 
of value, as has been shown by Dr. Salmon and alluded to in 
one of my previous papers. In this regard the following may 
not prove uninteresting: 
My assistant, Dr. Thomas Bowhill, M.R.C.V.S., happened 
to have in his possession some very delicate sections of tissues— 
lung and kidneys—of swine plague which he brought from Eng¬ 
land. I requested him to dismount them very carefully and to 
remove all the balsam out of them. I was particularly desirous 
he should do this, as it was especially appropriate that an Eng¬ 
lishman (or rather a Scotchman) should be the first to discover 
the true germ of swine plague in the tissues of English hogs, if 
possible. Dr. Bowhill (who has become an adept at staining, and 
does all my work of that nature), successfully demonstrated the 
presence of the same micro-organism in the tissues of his English 
hogs that we had invariably found in those we were studying 
here. 
The first American investigations were made by Drs. Law and 
Detmers and published successfully in the reports of the United 
States Department of Agriculture beginning with the year 1878 
and continuing in 1880-81, when Dr. Salmon enters upon the 
arena, though he had done some work previously. 
Dr. Law’s conclusion with regard to the etiological micro¬ 
organism of the American swine plague have not been confirmed 
by later investigations, but are as follows: 
“This affection is characterized, perhaps (!) most important of 
all by the presence of colonies of minute globular micrococci in 
