Medical Officers of the Army of India.

71

rarity of septation, and presents the characters which led F. Cohn to regard
his Streptothrix as a schizomycete organism. It is true that Sauvageau and
Radais*have apparently unequivocally demonstrated that he was wrong in
doing so, and that his Streptothrix is in reality a filamentous mycelium which
may at present be included within the provisional group Oospora, but this does
not in any way affect the question, seeing that, according to them, the species
of Oospora associated with actinomycosis is characterised by an entire absence
of septation. The observations of these authors alone are amply sufficient
to demonstrate the purely provisional character of the genus Oospora, seeing
that they make it include organisms with both septate and aseptate mycelium,
and therefore presumably belonging both to the group of higher fungi and to
the phycomycetes. A glance at the first figure in Plate II, which is taken from
an organism occurring in a neutral salt-solution as the result of air-con-
tamination, will show the characters presented by an Oosporic mycelium of the
type of Cohn's Streptothrix, and on comparing them with figures 2-4 of the
same plate, illustrating the fungal elements normal to the black variety of my-
cetoma, it will be at once evident that the latter are of an entirely different type.
In place of being aseptate the filaments are here built up of series of very
short, relatively broad cells, and in place of presenting any resemblance to
those of any filamentous schizomycete, they resemble those which enter into
the constitution of the sclerotia of any of the higher fungi which produce such
bodies ( Plate II, Fig. 3).

   Whilst then, in the absence of any demonstration of definitive fructifica-
tion, the fungal elements characteristic of the two common varieties of myce-
toma may, as a matter of convenience, be referred to the provisional genus
Oospora, this does not imply that they are specifically identical or even related
to one other in any way. On the contrary, in so far as mycelial characters
go, the evidence goes to show that they are absolutely unlike. The mycological
evidence, such as it is, goes to show that these two varieties of the disease are
associated with organisms of totally distinct nature, and this being so, it can
hardly be reasonably maintained that they constitute the specific primary cause
of it. The general clinical features of the disease in the two varieties, and the
structural details apart from the character of the concretions, are so precisely
alike that it is hard to follow observers like Boyce and Surveyor,†who whilst
affirming the absolute distinctness of the fungal elements present in them, yet
affirm that the latter are both pathogenic and both the specific cause of
the disease with which they are associated. In other words, they affirm
that two forms of disease which, in so far as all their general features

*Surles genus Cladothrix, Streptothrix, Actinomyces, etc. Annales de 1' Institut Pasteur, 1892, p. 242.

†Upon the existence of more than one fungus in Madura disease. Progs., Royal Society, June 9th,
1893.