Abstract
THE authors, in this latest edition, give a valuable and comprehensive survey of the methods which can be used for the bacteriological analysis of water, with special reference to American practice. Their desire for the unification and simplification of these methods is a reasonable one, though the difficulty of fixing an arbitrary standard, as they themselves point out, is that each sample of water must be judged individually upon the correlative evidence as well as upon the bacteriological findings. The importance they attach to the distinction between B. aerogenes and B. coli would appear to be minimised by this fact, but, where the distinction is necessary, some recent work by Taylor and Goyle in India seems to show that Eijkman's method of incubating the primary cultures at 46°C. provides a sufficiently reliable demarcation between the saprophytic and intestinal strains of coliform bacilli without lengthening the routine examination.
Elements of Water Bacteriology: with Special Reference to Sanitary Water Analysis.
By Prof. S. C. Prescott Prof. C. E. A. Winslow. Fifth edition, revised. Pp. ix + 219. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.; London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1931.) 12s. 6d. net.
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Biology. Nature 130, 618 (1932). https://doi.org/10.1038/130618b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/130618b0