INFECTION. 133 



astrous and wide-spread losses, and while, on the one hand, persons 

 interested in the Texan trade have justified their inattention to legal 

 restrictions by declaring them one and all unconstitutional, instances 

 have not been wanting of mob-law adopting its own expedients. 

 Dealers and farmers who owned Southern (Texan) cattle have been 

 threatened ; they have been pounced on in the dead of night, that 

 they might surely be found in their homes, and there and then 

 they have been requested to attend meetings of indignant and im- 

 poverished neighbors." 



What more can I say ? Surely mankind never makes restrictive 

 laws, especially in this country, to prevent traffic in a harmless dis- 

 ease, nor do men go about tearing people from their beds on account 

 of a " strictly non-infectious disease." 



Etiology. 



The cause of Texas fever has yet to be discovered. Gamgee 

 says, " It is an enzootic disorder " (another contradiction, for enzootic 

 itself implies some general cause, of an infectious or invasive na- 

 ture), " due to the food upon which Southern cattle subsist, whereby 

 their systems become charged with deleterious principles, that are 

 afterward dispersed by the excreta of apparently healthy as well as 

 obviously sick animals." 



This is a very nice way of using many words to say nothing. 

 Modern infection knows nothing of any such " deleterious princi- 

 ples" which work in this way. "Deleterious principles" means 

 nothing. They might be chemical in their nature, which would be 

 utterly incompatible with all our present ideas of infection. They 

 might be gases, although modern observers do not accept gases as 

 infecting material ; gases they should be, to conform with the gassy 

 nature of the report. 



Stages of the Disease. 



Gamgee speaks of four stages or periods of the disease, and yet 

 he says it is not an infectious disease. 



Pathology teaches that only infectious or contagious diseases 

 deport themselves in this manner. 



He speaks of — 



1. The incubative stage. 



2. The invasive stage (an infectious is not an invasive disease, 

 this term being used with reference to the action of animal parasites ; 

 hence we should say the period of active infection). 



3. The congestive or bleeding stage. 



4. Termination. 



