NEw YORK AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 63 
a system which is an adaptation of the Dewey system of classifying 
books, printed upon cards. It is an answer to the imperative need 
which has been felt of a means by which a rapid comparison can be 
readily made between cultures. 
Fuller & Johnson?° showed that the most stable characteristic of 
cultures of water bacteria could be conveniently printed upon a card 
and the reaction of given cultures indicated by + or —as the facts 
required. Conn adopted this method in connection with his first 
work upon dairy bacteria, extending somewhat the list of reactions 
there recorded. 
Gage & Phelps*! markedly extended the range of the card record. 
they added an ingenious plan of expressing numerically the reaction 
of the organism under groups of conditions so that 91 possible re- 
actions were recorded under 15 headings. At the same time, in con- 
nection with Kendall,” they introduced the use of group numbers 
which expressed the most important characteristics of the cultures 
in a form which permitted the orderly arrangement of the cards 
and the quick finding of duplicates. 
Kendall proposed a numerical system of recording the minute de- 
tails of culture growths. This extension in the matter of detail be~ 
fore there is agreement as to which are the more important culture 
differences simply increases confusion in the present state of the 
science. The time will undoubtedly come when this plan will be 
found useful in recording the influence of environment upon the 
details of culture growth. . 
Recognizing the value of these attempts at bringing order out of 
chaos the Society of American Bacteriologists appointed a commit- 
tee to draw up a card which should embody the maximum number 
of good features. This committee reported at the Ann Arbor meet- 
ing in 1905 and the New York meeting in 1906 and presented a 
card which the Society adopted provisionally. The committee was 
retained with instructions to improve the card as opportunity 
offered. An improved card was presented and adopted at the Chi- 
cago meeting in 1907. 
7» See note 3. 
“1 Gage, S. DeM. and Phelps, E. B. On the classificaton and identifica- 
tion of bacteria with a description of the card system in use at the Lawrence 
Experiment Staticn for records of species. Proc. Amer. Pub. Health Asso. 
28: 494-505. 1903. 
* Kendall, A. I. A proposed classification and method of graphical tabu- 
lation of the characters of bacteria. Proc. Amer. Pub. Health Asso. 28: 
481-493. 1903. 
