280 Seventeenth Annual Report of the 



festly only cases of extreme debility, the prostration attendant on 

 the fever and the profuse dysenteric discharges from the bowels. 

 This debility or paralysis may persist from 2 to 3 days only, or it 

 may prove permanent. 



With the bowels involved, fever runs high, and, following a 

 transient costiveness, a violent diarrhoea sets in, and even if 

 appetite is restored the prostration and debility become so extreme 

 that the patient may sink and finally perish in 5 or G days. In 

 one cow, which had been subjected to the same privations as the 

 calf mentioned in the last paragraph and in which the exterior of 

 the anus was one mass of blisters, the violent diarrhoea led to such 

 depletion, weakness and prostration, that the victim was unable 

 to rise for several days in succession, and was finally slaughtered 

 in this condition. As in the affection of the throat, the calves fed 

 on warm milk are the usual victims, and the loss of all the progeny 

 of a season is not uncommon. 



In a specially malignant type of the disease the womb is liable 

 to be implicated and abortion may follow, with an imperfect 

 development of the flow of milk, and the virtual loss of the cow's 

 products for that year. 



These irregular forms of the disease, like the occasional epi- 

 zootics of unusual malignancy, are on the whole very infrequent, 

 and often depend in no small degree on the planting of the virus 

 in a seriously debilitated or unhealthy system, on special priva- 

 tions like exhaustive journeys by rail or road, or on unwholesome 

 food, fibrous, lacking in nutritive ingredients, weathered by 

 storms, or heavily charged with cryptogams or bacteria. Ergots 

 or smuts in grasses or cereals always dispose to necrotic sores on 

 the mucous membranes of the mouth and skin and tend through 

 the nervous system to impair nutrition generally, so that these are 

 often contributory to a destructive type of foot and mouth disease. 

 Then, accumulations of sloppy manure and mud in stables and 

 yards, encrusting themselves between the toes and around the top 

 of the hoofs and on the udder and teats, not only tend to chaps, 

 cracks and other wounds, but introduce into the sores the complica- 

 tions of irritant and necrosing microbes, so that every point in- 

 fected with the germ of foot and mouth disease has a strong tend- 

 ency to assume a most unhealthy action. 



