Bacteriology.

  • International Congress of Hygiene and Demography
Date:
1892
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Bacteriology. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    accounts for it on the ground of the;exclusion of air from the pipes, in which the water has to remain for a certain length of time before it escapes from the supply taps. A similar phenomenon is accounted for by Frank* * * § on a .sedimentation hypothesis, which might be resorted to here also, for in the Stillorgan reservoir the water has abundant opportunity to deposit any solid particles that may be floating in it. Lastly, it has occurred to me that the thick, slimy, brown coating which covers the inner surface of the iron pipes, and seriously diminishes their calibre, as Mr. Harty informs me, may possibly exercise a destructive action upon the vitality o^ the organisms in the water. The growth is itself probably a bacterial product due to the species of leptothrix described -as iron bacteria by Winogradsky. I This concludes my enumeration work on the Vartry water. A large and flourishing suburb of Dublin, Eathmines, derives its water from another source, the River Dodder which rises in the extreme S.W. jjart of Dublin County and flows into the Liffey at its mouth. The Grlenasmole valley, whence the Rathmines supply is obtained, is in a limestone district, and its slopes are covered with recent peat. The pipe-distance traversed by the water is about 5 miles. Here I was obliged to conflne myself to an examination of the domestic tap-water, and the average results I obtained were 206 colonies per ec., a result which shows that although the Rathmines water is not nearly so good from the bacteriological standpoint as that of the metropolis, its germ content is nevertheless well within the limits laid down by Plagge and Proskauer.J Hitherto I have confined my remarks exclusively to germ enumera- tion, which according to the best authorities (Migula, vide supra) § yields but imperfect results. I have, therefore, determined to ascertain the specific characters of the organisms which occurred. For this purpose I utilised the well-known works of Eisenberg,|| Maschek,^ Adametz,** * * §§ and the Franklands,f ■]■ but [most of all O. E. R. Zimmermann’sJJ account of the bacteria of the Chemnitz water, and Professor Lustig’s “ Diagnostica dei Batteri delle Acque.”§ § Up to the present I have isolated 26 species of bacteria from the Dublin water. I do not propose |in the present paper to enter into a description of each, partly because I have not * Zeitschr. f. Hygiene, Bd. III., 1887, Heft. 3, p. 355. f Botan. Zeitug., 1888, p. 261. J Zeitsch. f. Hyg. Bd. II., 1887, Heft 3, p. 401. § Migula 1. c. II “ Bakteriologische Diagnostik, &c.” 2nd edition (a third has since appeared). Hamburg and Leipzig. Voss, 1888. ^ “Bakt. Untersuch der Leitmeritzer Trinkwasser ” (in the “ Jahresbericht der Kommunal-Oberrealschule in Leitmeritz fiir 1887”)* ** “ Die Bakterien der Trink-und-nutzwasser,” (a reprint from “ Die Mittheilungen der Versuchsstation f. Branerei u. Malzerei in Wien.” 1888). f| Zeitschr. f. Hygiene. Bd. VI., Heft. 3, p. 379 seq. JJ Chemnitz, Brunner, 1890. §§ Turin, Eosenberg and Sellier, 1890.