Medical Officers of the Army of India.
19
The macroscopic characters of tube cultivations also are neither specific
nor constant. In some cases the track of the needle is sharply defined and
opaque and surrounded either by a series of translucent prominences, which in
profile view form a wavy frill, or by a continuous translucent cloud with well-
defined margins, and acutely conical or clavate inferiorly. In other cases the
needle track presents a number of separate, very minute opaque points and is
acutely conical, wide above and tapering off inferiorly to a point. A translucent
cloud, like that just described, is sometimes present in these cases also. In
acid cultivations it was usually absent and the needle-track being of the taper
-ing character just described, the entire growth, including the surface halo
around the orifice, presented a tack-like figure. Some of the varieties of the
growth, especially that with defined track and frilled edges, were absolutely in
-distinguishable from those of certain other kinds of schizomycete organisms.
The entire series of cultivations demonstrated the correctness of the state
- m e n t t h a t , s o f a r a s m a c r o s c o p i c c h a r a c t e r s g o , a g a r - a g a r j e l l y i s n o t a f a v o u r a b l e
medium for the manifestation of specific physiological properties of the schizo
-mycete organisms cultivated in it.
The influence of the substratum came out very clearly in connection with
the appearance of filamentous forms consisting of commas united in linear series.
Such forms were only very rarely developed in solid media and then only in very
small numbers. In fluid media, on the other hand, they formed a conspicuous
feature, more especially in dilute agar-agar solutions, in which in some cases
to a great extent, they replaced the common isolated commas. In no instance
did the filaments appear to be of truly spiral type. They were merely sinuous
or undulated in various degrees according to the amount of curvature in the
component commas.
The individual commas were, as a rule, of considerable size. The outlines
of the filaments in some cases were alike on both sides due to the concave sur
-faces of the component commas being directed alternately to either side (Plate
III, Fig. 1C.) In other cases there was an absence of bilateral symmetry and
the convexities and concavities of the commas were throughout directed to one
or other side. Here, of course, one side of the filament presented a series of
rounded, and the other of acute prominences (Plate III, Fig. 1C) These
characters were, however, by no means necessarily constant throughout the
entire length of a filament, the arrangement of the commas on which they
depended frequently varying from place to place. It does not appear quite
clearly which arrangement ought to be regarded as the typical one. Where
the multiplication of commas is of the common transverse character, it is
natural to suppose that any filamentous form origination as the result of con
-tinued adhesion of the commas to one another will be of unilateral type. The
same will naturally be the case in the case of the short filaments represent-
ing the primary pair of commas which have arisen as the result of processes
of longitudinal division in parent bodies of bi-convex outline. Where, on the
3A