ETIOLOGICAL MOMENT OF AMERICAN SWINE PLAGUE. 65 
Another example will suffice : 
“ On June 10 I took two perfectly clean (! !) four-ounce vials 
and put in each three ounces of clean well water, in which no 
bacteria, or any living thing could be found. In one vial marked 
No. 1,1 put half a drop of the fresh pulmonal exudation of a hog 
that had died of swine plague,” p. 385, report 1879. 
The more one reflects upon such a methodic the more must be 
his astonishment that Dr. Detmers should arrive at such compara¬ 
tively accurate ideas of the biological conditions presented by the 
bacterium of the American swine plague. As has been said, a 
pure cultivation of this organism, under such organisms, can have 
only been an accidental occurrence. 
Even the material which I have quoted from Dr. Detmers’ 
publications has been very carefully selected from among many 
vague assertions, and in some cases absolute contradictions, as 
may be seen from the following passage : 
“ The spherical, or single micrococci, undergo their first 
change, and develop into bispherical bodies, till the glia breaks 
open, when a great many bispherical schizophytse, and also some 
of the spherical bodies, become free. The former (the bispherical 
bodies), thus freed, very soon commence to multiply by fission ; but 
this process results in the production of bispherical, not spherical 
cells, or micrococci, the latter must have another origin,” p. 188, 
report 1880. 
No further evidence is necessary to show that, while Detmers 
at many times describes phenomena connected with the germ of 
swine plague, at the same time he had no distinct idea of the 
real vegetative phenomena of the object he was describing. 
In the above quotation he contradicts himself in the most 
startling manner. 
First he tells us that “ the spherical cells , or single micrococci , 
undergo their first change and develop into bispherical bodies ,” 
which is absolutely correct, and then he says that they do no such 
thing, by saying, that u these spherical cells or micrococci must 
have some other origin .” 
He missed the first stage of development, that from the ma¬ 
ture germ, or bispherical bodies, into micrococci, and describes 
