JOINT DISEASE AMONGST CALVES AND LAMBS. 329 



the animal is costive, its urine high-coloured, and the affected 

 joints are hot, tender, and swollen. The capsules of the 

 joints are distended, and there is more or less general tume- 

 faction. The local symptoms may disappear from one joint, 

 and attack another, or several. The joints undergo de- 

 generation if the disease continues. 



When calves are scrofulous and seized with joint disease, 

 Mr Robertson finds that the stifle joint is chiefly involved. 

 The disease is more one of the ends of bones the epiphyses 

 than of the synovial membrane, or other structure of the 

 joints. The joint is very tense, hard, and swollen. There 

 is a tendency to tubercular deposit in the bone, and soften- 

 ing. 



In lambs the form of disease is chiefly of the second 

 variety above described, the animals are either born with the 

 diseased joints, or show symptoms shortly after birth. Mr 

 Robertson says, that the shepherd is apt to remark that 

 " this or that lamb cannot live, it is pocking at the navel." 

 The belly is pendulous from the presence of a turbid fluid in 

 the peritoneal cavity; in this fluid are floating shreds of un- 

 healthy looking fibrin. The umbilical cord is always much 

 enlarged, so much so as to attract attention, whenever the 

 lamb is dropped ; it is soft, flabby, and the vessels filled with 

 very dark coloured blood. There does not seem the least 

 inclination to that early change of these structures, into the 

 well defined ligamentous cord extending to the liver, charac- 

 teristic of the perfectly healthy animal; instead of this there 

 is developed a chain of cysts, containing pus mixed with 

 tubercular matter, extending from the umbilicus to the liver, 

 this latter organ exhibiting change of structure, and the 

 presence of pustular and tubercular matter; the omentum 

 and mesenteric glands occasionally showing like morbid 

 conditions, from which, as a sequel, we have the presence in 



