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In 1915 Futaki, Takaki, Taniguchi and Osumi! discovered in a swollen lymph gland of a rat-bite fever patient a spirochete which they regarded as the cause of this disease. A month later, Ishiwara, Ohtawara and Tamura" succeeded in finding the same spirochete in a guinea-pig experimentally infected with rat-bite fever, transmitted by the bite of a wild rat. Subsequently Kitagawa, Kato, Abe and Mukoyama," Futaki and his associates/ Kaneko and Okuda," and ROW,6 in India, each group working separately, again demonstrated the existence of this spirochete, making use of specimens obtained from human beings j and Ido, Ito, Wani and Okuda" showed that there is a specific relation between Futaki's spirochete and antibody in the blood of patients. Spirochaeta morsus-muris, as it was designated by Futaki and his associates," has since been proved beyond doubt to be the causative agent of the rat-bite disease occurring in Japan. In addition to the investigations just noted, there have been published in Japan several papers on the rat-bite fever spirochete. A number of contradictory statements in these publications have led us to repeat certain experiments; moreover our interest in the morphologic similarity between this spirochete and that found in the blood of the field vole by Miyajima has made a comparative study of these strains advisable .. For this experiment we selected four strains of the spirochete, the human~and 2,* the wild rat and the field vole strains.

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