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Several investigators1–4 have shown that burned animals are quite susceptible to systemic invasion by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We have produced fatal septicemia in mice by immersion of the scalded tail (immersed in water at 70°C for five sec) in cultures of Pseudomonas strain 180. For purposes of local therapy the tails have been enclosed in rubber tubing held in place by stapling to the loose skin at the base of the tail (figure 1). Therapy consisted of suspending the drugs in a vanishing cream base and injecting the suspension into the tubes, which were then sealed with a cork. Treatment was given six hr after challenge. Details of the techniques employed may be found in recent publications.5,6 In a comparative study of eleven chemotherapeutic agents, six were highly effective in preventing death. (See table 1). The mortality with 8.5% sulfamylon acetate was 8%; 0.25% chloramphenicol, 0.5% gentamycin, 0.4% neomycin, and 1% streptomycin all produced zero mortality; 0.5 sulfadiazine gave 10% mortality. Little effect on survival was observed from 0.2% polymyxin, 0.1% colimycin, 0.25% tetracycline, 0.25% penicillin G, or 0.5% silver nitrate. Ninetythree% of untreated animals died and 90% with the vanishing cream alone.5 A similar study was carried out on mice treated systemically, and without local therapy. Treatment was begun six hr after the challenge and repeated once daily for four additional days. It was found that sulfadiazine given orally in doses of 100 to 500 mg/kg brought about complete survival, and streptomycin administered subcutaneously in doses of 100 mg/kg produced 90% survival (table 2). The drugs currently in use, polymyxin, colimycin, and gentamycin had little effect in the usual therapeutic doses. A comparison of in vivo activity with in vitro sensitivity revealed that test tube activity is not a reliable index of therapeutic action (table 3). Gentamycin, polymyxin, and colimycin were bacteriostatic at 1 μg per ml. Only gentamycin exhibited local activity, and colimycin was without effect systemically. Chloramphenicol, sulfadiazine, and streptomycin were equally active in vitro (25 μg/ml). All were effective locally, but systemically, chloramphenicol was inactive while sulfadiazine and streptomycin were most effective.

“Properties of the instruments,” I. A. Richards reminds us, “enter into the account of the investigation.” We should not, I believe, take a narrow definition of technology in the title of our section or of instruments to mean only those devices mentioned by Professor Venezky in his contribution. Whatever instruments we use are in part conditioned by our previous experiences and by the way we conceive our research. It is no accident that one of the three great nineteenth-century North British lexicographers-Joseph Wright-began life in a mill sorting grades of wool. And if those lexicographers present don’t recognize themselves in that apprenticeship, perhaps we might remind ourselves that as his first act as editor of the New English Dictionary J. A. H. Murray built at the bottom of his garden at Mill Hill School an iron house with over a thousand pigeonholes built into it. Doubtless we should not take that iron house in the garden too metaphorically, but it is nevertheless correct, as Richards says, that the outcome of our research will be conditioned by the devices we use in its execution. Pigeonholes impose structure, and dictionary editors continue to see themselves as imposing structure on vagrant word usages that blend into each other imperceptibly. Another metaphor from the general explanation that prefaces the OED reveals this conception (and reminds us, by the way, of those ‘‘fuzzy features” that Professors Bolinger, Lakoff and Pike have spoken about earlier in the conference): “That vast aggregate of words and phrases which constitutes the Vocabulary of English-speaking men presents, to the mind that endeavours to grasp it as a definite whole, the aspect of one of those nebulous masses familiar to the astronomer, in which a clear and unmistakable nucleus shades off on all sides through zones of decreasing brightness, to a dim marginal film that seems to end no where but to lose itself imperceptibly in the surrounding darkness.” * The writer here speaks, of course, of the whole aggregate of English vocabulary as a light that illumines the darkness, but, as we see in almost every entry in the dictionary, the same image informs the conception of word senses blending themselves imperceptibly into one another. And yet the job of the editor is to sort citations into discrete pigeon holes, to enlarge his ’ sorting board if need be until he satisfies himself that the “breaks” between the meanings are revealed. Such a conception, derived from the technology of pigeonholes, is brought to our attention in Leo Spitzer’s memoir of his studies in Romance Philology under Meyer-Liibke, whose conception of linguistic history was akin to that of the founders of English historical lexicography. “We were always looking over our shoulder,” Spitzer recalls, “but where was reflected in this teaching my