The cat flea, Ctenocephalides felis, is a major pest species on companion animals thus of significant importance to the animal health industry. The aim of this study was to develop sampling and storage protocols and identify stable reference genes for gene expression studies to fully utilize the growing body of molecular knowledge of C. felis. RNA integrity was assessed in adult and larvae samples, which were either pierced or not pierced and stored in RNAlater at ambient temperature. RNA quality was maintained best in pierced samples, with negligible degradation evident after 10 days. RNA quality from non-pierced samples was poor within 3 days. Ten candidate reference genes were evaluated for their stability across four group comparisons (developmental stages, genders, feeding statuses and insecticide-treatment statuses). Glyceraldehyde 3 phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), 60S ribosomal protein L19 (RPL19) and elongation factor-1α (Ef) were ranked highly in all stability comparisons, thus are recommended as reference genes under similar conditions. Employing just two of these three stable reference genes was sufficient for accurate normalization. Our results make a significant contribution to the future of gene expression studies in C. felis, describing validated sample preparation procedures and reference genes for use in this common pest.

Laboratory ferrets (Mustela putorius furo) were each inoculated with 500 larvae of a strain of Trichinella spiralis that had been passaged in mice for many generations. The recovery of adult worms from ferrets on Days 4 and 7 of infection represented a mean of 32% of the inoculum, with most of the worms being in the anterior three quarters of the small intestine. Larvae subsequently became encysted in the ferret musculature, with the diaphragm alone yielding as many as 5,750 larvae upon digestion.

For comparative purposes, mice were each inoculated with 200 T. spiralis from the same batch of larvae. The recovery of adult worms from mice represented a mean of 54% of the inoculum. An abrupt decline in worm population, typical of infections in the mouse, was observed in both mouse and ferret hosts; in neither species had the decline begun on Day 7 of infection, but it had clearly begun by Day 11 and was essentially ended by Day 14.

In December 1916 David Goldstein, Catholic convert and former Jewish socialist cigarmaker, approached Boston's Cardinal William Henry O'Connell with a novel plan. Goldstein wanted to deliver lectures on Catholicism from a custom-built Model-T Ford on Boston Common. A little over a year later, across the Atlantic, Vernon Redwood, a transplanted tenor from New Zealand, asked Francis Cardinal Bourne of Westminster for permission to speak on behalf of the church in Hyde Park. Both Goldstein and Redwood received episcopal approval and Boston's Catholic Truth Guild and London's Catholic Evidence Guild were born. The emergence of these two movements marked a new epoch in the history of the Roman Catholic laity in the English-speaking world. The fact that the lay evangelist appeared on the scene during the First World War and in the aftermath of the Vatican condemnations of Americanism (1899) and Modernism (1907), actions generally assumed to have dampened the spirit of individual initiative in the church, renders them all the more illuminating to scholars of modern Catholicism. Goldstein and Redwood both exemplified and encouraged the new assertiveness which began to characterize a growing number of the American and English laity by the First World War. They call our attention to a significant shift in the self-identity of the lay population which came to fruition during the period between the World Wars, a shift which prompted even tenors and cigarmakers to mount the public pulpit.

With the publication of Catholic Revivalism in 1978, Jay P. Dolan transferred the scholarly discussion of nineteenth-century American revivalism to a larger arena. He not only unveiled the Catholic counterpart of a phenomenon hitherto considered exclusively Protestant, but he also demonstrated that potentially fruitful comparisons might be drawn between the Protestant and the Catholic revival experiences. Although twentieth-century evangelism still awaits an inclusive ecumenical treatment along the lines pursued by Dolan, some promising subjects for initial forays into this field have surfaced. This essay focuses upon one minor character in the epic story of American Catholic evangelism, David Goldstein (1870–1958), a convert from Judaism and socialism and a pioneer lay Catholic street lecturer between the world wars.