HOG CHOLERA, OR SWINE PLAGUE. 
415 
made his first report to the commissioners of agriculture at the 
same time (1878), and who has been engaged upon a more or less 
continued series of investigations for the agricultural department, 
upon this disease, which have been published in its annual reports 
ever since. 
With Law, Salmon seems to have looked upon a micrococcus 
as the cause of this disease, up to the year 1885, and to have 
received experimental testimony, which justified him in saying: 
Surely we have here sufficient evidence that a reliable vaccine 
might easily be prepared if we carry our investigations a little 
way further. Page 57, report of 1883, in another place, the 
same authority says of this micrococcus that these experiments 
were made and accounts of them published in advance of those of 
M. Pasteur , and the evidence furnished was all that could reason- 
sonably be repaired to decide a scientific question of this kind. In 
; the report of 1881, page 229, he (Dr. Salmon) enters into a 
polemic against Dr. Klein of England, who had discarded his 
micrococcus in favor of a bacillus, and then says: A large num¬ 
ber of observations similar to the above have been made , and in all 
cases , where a pure cultivation has been obtained , the organism 
which multiplied teas a micrococcus , and when the virulence of 
such cultivated micrococci has been tested by inoculation experi¬ 
ments , typical cases of some plague have resulted. Any one who 
carefully reads these reports which Dr. Salmon has made in 
regard to his experiments with this micrococcus, would certainly 
be led to the conclusion that “the evidence furnished was all that 
reasonably could be required to decide a scientific question of this 
kind,” but alas, it does not seem to have brought Dr. Salmon even 
to any decisive conclusion, for in his report of 1885, page 785, he 
seems to have had some doubt about the correctness of this testi¬ 
mony, and that the scientific question had not yet been decided by 
him. Here he tells us that he was perplexed by contradictory 
\ results, and failing to obtain any pathogenic germ by isolating the 
different forms found in peritoneal effusions. The discovery of a 
fine bacillus in Germany causing a disease in some which was 
regarded as identical with swine plague in England and the United 
States attracted our attention. It is difficult to see why Dr. 
