Selected monographs.

  • New Sydenham Society.
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Selected monographs. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    5:3 principal forms of the plant found in the soil and air of malarious places, which, after cultivation, produced forms-of disease exactly the same as those produced hy the crude material which was the basis of cultivation; and it is sufficient to have shown experi- mentally that one determinate form of bacillus must be regarded as the exciting cause of the disease. It remains for botanists to determine what ulterior developments this organism may have, and all its biological attributes. We have stated how the commoner forms of bacillus malaria proceed from homogeneous filaments often twisted or looped, which, when cultivated in fish gelatine, in egg albumen, urine, divide into joints, and produce spores in their interior both before and after this division. The situation of the spores varies; sometimes they are only found at the two ends of the articulation, at other times in the middle, and again at another time there may be a median spore and also two terminal ones—characteristics which distinguish bacillus malaria from all other bacilli. Some cultivations showed us very well the development of filaments from these spores when set free. In the oval shining corpuscles so often described, one of the poles is elongated into an appendix, wbich is slowly converted into a rod; sometimes in young spores one sees the clearing up of the substance of one pole precede the formation of the appendix; at other times the formation proceeds from both poles of the spore at the same time, leading to the formation of two appendices. The rods elongating produce homogeneous filaments; some- times two terminal spores are developed in the interior of these, or one median ; in a few cases the spores are developed in their interior in such a way as to make one think that they are the products of the division in situ of a previously formed spore. Sometimes before the production of articulated filaments we see form in their interior some brilliant oval bodies (Table EL, fig. 1, d), and the filament grows so rapidly that one can watch its increase with the eye, becoming full of small brilliant granules, whilst the oval spores fade away. We are not in a position to decide whether the small granules arc derived from the breaking up of the spores, or a multiplication of them due to a new precipitation of plasma. This mode of evolution seems to be connected with certain forms seen by us in cultivation of the air of Ninfa and Fogliano