178 THE DISEASES OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS. 



stereotyped denial on the part of the Government and the horse 

 interests ; yet I venture to assert that there are to the thousand fifty 

 per cent more glandered horses in this country than cattle having 

 the contagious lung-plague, and that the former disease is extending 

 with more rapidity among our equine than the latter among our 

 bovine population. 



The government gives the people no means of knowing the 

 facts from trustworthy statistics. The United States Agricultural 

 Department of Statistics, with regard to animal diseases, is a dis- 

 graceful farce. 



Etiology. 



In our remarks upon the views of different authors with regard 

 to the nature of glanders, we have unavoidably touched upon their 

 ideas as to its cause, which renders necessary some repetition in this 

 place. 



We have not time to discuss all these views in detail; but we, 

 as those before us, are all children of the period, and can not well 

 separate ourselves from the opinions prevailing at the time ; yet we 

 must, in all things, ever entertain a certain degree of skepticism : 

 to doubt is the beginning of self -education. A person who has 

 never doubted is an ignorant believer, and has no self-knowledge 

 — a mere puppet, unfit to be a member of any profession. 



So in glanders, one party has looked upon it from the iatro- 

 chemical stand-point, looking upon an abnormal degree of oxidation, 

 or an undue degree of acidity of the blood as the cause ; others, 

 of the humoral-pathological school, saw its origin in all sorts of 

 dyscrasies — not diatheses, as Fleming has written — and even from 

 our stand-point we can speak of glanders dyscrasia, but not in the 

 way of humoral pathology, whereby the dyscrasia was the cause of 

 glanders, but from the natural scientific sense, the dyscrasia being 

 a part of the disease, the same as the neoplastic processes ; that is, 

 the result of the action of the inficiens. Others saw in it a form of 

 equine scrofulosis ; and still others looked upon it from the neuro- 

 path ological stand-point ; while others saw in it a form of tuberculosis, 

 and with the eruption of the pyaemia theory, we find it classed with 

 that kind of diseases. Nearly all these different views led to the 

 more or less strong opposition of the contagious nature of the dis- 

 ease, and, as we have seen, to great losses on the part of the people. 



Is glanders pyaemia ? 



The whole theory of the autochtone development of glanders is 

 more dependent upon a few experiments with pysemic material 

 than anything else. 



