The opportunities of a pathologist at a large Eastern Hospital are many; but his time for research work is short, and his conveniences are few. I, therefore, feel that we, at the Laboratory of the Rangoon General Hospital, are more than usually fortunate to be able to give, within the first two years of the official existence of the Laboratory, an account of a strange disease. Doubtless it is to chance that we owe the first discrimination of the disease; but I hope that it has been by accurate observation and precise experiment that we have sought to fulfil our knowledge. The guidance and application of our observations have been my care, and upon me rests the responsibility for the accuracy of our work; but the work itself has been carried out entirely by my assistants, and to them belongs the credit for the zeal and patient perseverance with which the task has been performed.

1. B. coli (Escherich) produces papillated colonies and shows marked variability in the size of its colonies whenit is grown on agar to which phenylacetic acid has been added in the form of the sodium salt.

The big and little colonies produce about the same amount of gas when tested on glucose.

2. When B. coli (Escherich) is grown on agar containing monochlorhydrin it throws off variants similar to those produced when grown on monochloracetate of soda media. Speaking broadly they ferment alcohols with gas formation, and sugars without gas formation.

3. B. lactis aerogenes grown on monochlorhydrin agar gives rise to variants unable to ferment glycerine.

4. In cases of inhibitory bacterial selection by chemical agents a careful comparison of the surviving cells with the orginal strain from which they were derived is calculated to indicate that portion or function of the cell which is implicated in the cell's intoxication. This question does not seem to have been attacked hitherto from this standpoint.

5. The cell ferments by virtue of their specific chemical affinities mayplay a part in cell intoxication.

Jerusalem is the resort of so many tourists and pilgrims who chiefly visit the country in the healthy spring season and see little of the conditions in which the poor of the land live, that it may be difficult for them to realize that it is a city where malaria is exceedingly rife and where the most elementary sanitary regulations are utterly neglected.There is no proper public water supply, no sewers worth the name, vaccination is not enforced even when small-pox is epidemic and there is no attempt to isolate those suffering from infectious diseases. This state of things is undoubtedly largely due to remissness and ignorance on the part of the Turkish Government, but the situation is made very complicated and difficult on account of the “ Capitulations ” by which all foreign subjects are practically independent of the Local Authority "and accept no orders except through their own Consuls.

One of the fundamental features of Ehrlich's method of standardising diphtheria antitoxic serum is the recognition of the so-called Lo and L+ limits, the L+ dose being the quantity of a toxin which when mixed with one unit of antitoxin and injected subcutaneously into a guinea-pig leaves sufficient excess of toxin free to cause the death of the animal about the fifth day after injection, the Lo dose being the largest quantity which when similarly mixed with one unit of antitoxin fails to produce a local reaction. In the region between the two doses, the so-called “ Differential-Region ” of Ehrlich, one can obtain a series of mixtures which, while they kill the guinea-pig later than the fifth day or not at all, cause local reactions of varying severity increasing as the L+ limit is reached.

Variations in bacteria may be said to fall into two classes (1) those which are temporary, and dependent on the environment, the bacteria tending to return to the original type when subculture is made on ordinary media; and (2) those which are fixed, and persist after repeated subcultures on ordinary indifferent media.

In former reports by us, considerable attention was devoted to a study of the number and nature of the cellular elements in milk.We found that cells, sometimes in enormous numbers, are present in all milk (cow, goat, ass, man), that considerable variations in number occur without apparent cause, and that the presence of the slighter forms of non-suppurative mastitis does not seem to influence definitely the number of these cells.