Page:Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, volume 2 (3).djvu/14

122 strictly domestic habits of this blood-sucking pest, were in perfect accordance with the peculiar epidemiology of the disease, and, no doubt, the destruction of bed-bugs might prove a very important, if not the most essential element, in the prevention of kala-azar.

With Captain Patton, he believed that a double flagellum, in some of the free active forms of the kala-azar parasite and closely allied organisms, was merely evidence of incipient binary fission. However, other organisms had been described which certainly possessed two flagella. In the corresponding culture-forms of the trypanoplasmata, they would naturally expect to find two flagella arising from the anterior end of the single, undividing individuals, and two pairs of flagella in the dividing forms.

No doubt, it would soon be necessary to break up the trypanosominæ into a greater number of genera than he (Dr. Sambon) had done in his classification of the Hæmoprotozoa, but, for the time being, owing to the very imperfect state of their knowledge on the complicated life-history of these parasites, he was unable to adopt the genera Crithidia and Herpetomonas, proposed by Léger some years ago when still less was known. The forms thus named appeared to him to represent only particular stages in the life-history of organisms they would certainly ascribe either to the genus Trypanoplasma or to the genus Trypanosoma, did they know the relative free forms in the blood of the respective vertebrate hosts. Indeed, it was more than likely that, in many cases, both the trypanosoma- and herpetomonas-forms of a same organism were known, but that their relationship had escaped them. It was a well-known fact that many trypanosomes, of which they had been able to obtain culture-forms, exhibited, in the artificial