Medical Officers of the Army of India.
cete organisms in the original, supposed choleraic material, but there was cer-
tainly a failure in the development of any in the cultivation derived from it. At
this stage another supply of material from the same case came over from the
hospital. As a certain amount of suspicion had been aroused in regard to the
nature of the case, the reaction of this material was tested and found to be acid
. As, however, there was nothing else specially to distinguish it from other mate
-rials, which had yielded commas on cultivation, a fresh plate was set. On the
following morning this was very carefully examined, specimens being taken from
every form of colony which appeared in any way to present distinctive features,
but in none could any commas by detected. The bed-head ticket containing
the history and treatment of the patient was now sent for, and from it it was
ascertained that, although admitted and treated for some time as a choleraic
one, the case had subsequently been recognised as one of malarial fever. The
phenomena in this case naturally led to a careful revision of all the others in
which plate cultivations had failed to produce recognisable crops of commas,
and, as has been already shown, in all save one it appeared that there were
either reasons for suspecting the truly choleraic character of the material, or
that conditions were present in the substratum to which the phenomenon might
reasonably be ascribed.
One other case deserves some special notice, namely, one in which, whilst
the original material appeared to be devoid of recognisable commas, a plate
cultivation of it yielded a crop of them. The apparent absence of commas from
the original material may have been due to their being present in very small
numbers and to their having failed to stain well due to the nature of the material
in which they were situated. That the latter condition may exert considerable
influence in certain instances appears not to be improbable, for I have more than
once observed that in cases like the one at present under consideration, where the
flocculi were of a very gelatinoid mucous character, a special difficulty in obtain-
ing satisfactorily stained preparations was encountered, the material seeming to
obstruct the stains in penetrating the substance of bodies embedded in it. On
the other hand, however, I believe that the failure to detect commas in the original
material may have been really due to the fact that no such bodies were present
in it, for it by no means necessarily follows that because a material contains bodies
capable of giving rise to commas under favourable circumstances, it should
contain actual commas as well. This point, which has already been alluded to,
will be more fully considered subsequently.
Taking the entire series of observations on choleraic materials, the results
certainly appear to indicate that the belief in the presence of easily cultivable
commas as a very constant and characteristic feature in the dejections and intes-
tinal contents in cases of the disease is a well-founded one. They also indi-
-cate the absolute-necessity of cultivations in suitable substrata in order to the
attainment of any definite conclusions in regard to the presence of bodies of
such nature in any material, for they show in the first place that materials may
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