252 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



suscitated him; then he gave him some medicine which cured him. 

 Cipriano Fisher told me that he had cured a valuable bulldog of 

 rabies by this same method, using the bitter juice of the pitahaya, a 

 species of cactus, for medicine. This crude means of alleged cure is 

 unique, and seems based on the theory that the antipathy of rabid 

 animals to water, implied in the name hydrophobia, is the cause of 

 their death, and partial drowning, therefore, a cure. 



Rabies is extremely prevalent at times in certain districts of the 

 Cape region. McLellan says it does not occur north of the tropic of 

 Cancer — that is, of La Paz and Todos Santos — and it is hardly known 

 in the thickly populated district about San Jose del Cabo, but at 

 Cape San Lucas, and especially also along the base of the mountains 

 near Miraflores and Agua Caliente, where it is very hot and dry, 

 rabid animals are greatly to be feared. While collecting in these 

 mountains I passed several good ranches which had been deserted 

 because, as my guide said, stock could not be raised there successfully 

 on account of the rahia. 



This man had worked as a ranchero or stock herder for two years 

 on one of these ranches, and had been obliged at one time to kill 

 eleven cattle and seven sheep and goats in two weeks on account of 

 their having rabies. It was part of his duty to follow up rabid 

 coyotes, foxes, skunks, and wild cats when he saw them or heard 

 their peculiar cry, and shoot them before they bit the stock. But he 

 assured me very gravely that he preferred to work in the valley for 

 less wages rather than have charge of Chollalito rancho; and when 

 we camped there for a night he slept on top of the pack boxes, with 

 his bare feet wrapped in blankets and a serape over his head, and 

 reverently pulled out the blessed rag he wore around his neck, in 

 order to more surely protect himself against the rabid skunks and 

 coyotes. There is, however, very little danger in traveling through 

 this interesting country. Cases of hydrophobia are comparatively 

 rare, and some scientists who have collected in Baja California have 

 even denied its existence there. But with the traveler, as with the 

 native, there remains the vague, constant, but unrealized expectation 

 of seeing some raging coyote come tearing through the cactus, or of 

 having his toe bitten in the middle of the night as he sprawls in the 

 heat and darkness. 



Professor Welldon, in the British Association, expressed his sense of 

 the intellectual insolence of those who presume to say, notwithstanding our 

 ignorance of animal characters, that because a characteristic seems to us 

 minute and without importance, it is therefore without importance to the 

 animal. Until we know the function of the animal throughout, and can 

 picture its physiological processes thoroughly, we have no right to say, 

 a priori, that this or that feature is of no use. 



