File:The American Museum journal (c1900-(1918)) (17538346104).jpg

Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo16amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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For identification of a new microbe it is necessary to compare its behavior with that of standard types, hence the nerd of a collection of standard type^. Each pin on the map above represents a university, or normal-school, or board-of-health laboratory which has received cultures for study from the American Museum collection by totu'hing the old growth with the tip of a platinum needle and transferring an invisible, but potent, inoculum to a new culture tube. There are now about seven hundred different strains of living t)acteria in the Museum collection, representing practi- cally all known types of this di\'erse group. Bul)onic plague has alone been excluded, on account of accidents which have occurred in other laboratories with this peculiarly deadly germ. Typhoid and diphtheria germs, however, are to be found, with those of whooping cough and cholera, meningitis and leprosy, influenza and pneiuuonia, and a dozen more of such pathogenic forms. The original strain of tubercle bacillus iso- lated by Robert Koch is there, with one of the most recently discovered of disease germs, isolated by Plotz and believed by him to be the cause of typhus fever. In the collection, also, are the bacteria which cause plant diseases and those which decompose foods. There are strains of the Bulgarian bacillus which makes buttermilk and the lactic acid t)acteria utilized by the tanner. One germ that infects sugar cane came from Louisiana and another was found fixing nitrogen in the soil of a bean field in the Middle West. The keeping of records incident to the maintenance of this collection is in itself no light task. For each of the nearly seven hundred types there is a history card with a serial number on which every single transfer to a fresh tube is entered, with the date and the initials of the bacteriologist, so that one can tell at a glance exactly what has happened to each strain since it was added to the collection. The previous history, source, and original date of isolation of the cul- ture is of course kept on file, and a cross index by names makes it possible to find 297

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