THE HORSE. 159 



is the great saving of material. Many horses are each year killed 

 and sent to the knackers which, were hippophagy a custom in this 

 country, would bring to the owners money enough to buy animals 

 suitable for certain work. Horses condemned to death on account 

 of broken limbs would not then become a dead loss to owners, but 

 would bring from forty to sixty dollars for food-purposes. Also, 

 from a humanitarian point of view, the question is deserving of con- 

 sideration. Many a person has an old horse which years have ren- 

 dered unsuitable for working purposes, yet the owner's circumstances 

 will not permit the killing of the animal. "Were it the custom 

 to consume horse-meat, such animals could be very easily brought to 

 a fairly fat condition, and at small expense, thus bringing far more 

 money to the owner, from the shambles, than could possibly be their 

 worth from a working point of view. 



Glanders. 



French, Morve ; German, Rotz. 



History. — "Williams says glanders was described by Aristotle, 

 which is an error ; in Aubert's and "Wimmer's German translation 

 of his " Natural History " with the original text, it says : " The ass 

 — but not the horse — suffers especially from one disease, which is 

 known as ' malis.' It at first attacks the head, a viscid yellow slime 

 running from the nostrils ; when the disease extends to the lungs it 

 is deadly, but when limited to the head it is not so." 



It is impossible to see how any one can affirm the above to be 

 a description of glanders, for it is equally applicable to strangles, 

 especially when complicated with malarial pneumonia, commonly 

 called influenza, the proper name of which should be pneumo-pleuro- 

 enteritis equinse infectiosum. 



The first writer of antiquity to describe anything like glanders 

 was undoubtedly Apsyrtus, who lived in the fourth century a. d. 

 He united under the name of " /xakk " several dangerous diseases, 

 while he describes farcy as elephantiasis. Yegetius followed in the 

 same direction in the next century. 



Long before the disease was known to be transmissible to man, 

 it derived a certain pathological interest from the assumption that 

 it was a cause of syphilis in man, due to improper cohabitation 

 with mares. This idea seems to have sprung from the coeval out- 

 break of glanders among the horses, and syphilis among the soldiers, 

 at the famous siege of Naples in the sixteenth century. Syphilis is 

 not inoculable in animals. 



