PAPERS presented last summer at the French Congress for Tuberculosis at Paris demonstrate, says The Medical News, what has hitherto been very doubtful, that aviary and human tuberculosis are essentially the same pathologic process due to the same germ modified by a cultural environment, but convertible under favorable circumstances one into the other. An Englishman has found that more than ten per cent. of canaries and other song birds that die in captivity succumb to tuberculosis, and parrots have come in for a share of condemnation in this connection. By far the larger number of monkeys who die in captivity are carried off by tuberculosis, and while, fortunately, the keeping of monkeys as house pets is not very general, at the same time there is some danger of contagion. Nocard, the greatest living authority on tuberculosis in animals, and the man to whom we owe the best culture methods for the tubercle bacillus, found in a series of autopsies on dogs that out of two hundred successive autopsies on unselected dogs that died at the great veterinary school at Alfort, near Paris, in more than one-half the cases there were tubercular lesions, and in many of them the lesions were of such a character as to make them facile and plenteous disseminators of infective tuberculous materials.

Parrots are known to be susceptible to a disease peculiar to themselves, and a number of fatal cases in human beings of what was at first supposed to be malignant influenza, pneumonia was traced to the bacillus which is thought to be the cause of the parrot disease. Cats are sometimes known to have tuberculosis, and that they have in many cases been carriers of diphtheria and other ordinary infections is more than suspected. There is not at present any great need for a crusade on sanitary grounds against the keeping of pet animals, but they are multiplying more and more, and it does not seem unreasonable that greater care in the matter of determining the first signs of disease should be demanded of their owners, and then so guarding them as to prevent their being a source of contagion to human beings. Attention should be paid to this warning as regards children, as animals play more freely with them and the children are more apt to be infected.