CESTOID EPIDEMIC OF ICELAND. 87 



are so fatally exposed into tlie inhabitants of this island. How 

 this may be effected the following remarks may serve to show. It 

 is well known that the Icelanders carry on an extensive breeding 

 of cattle and sheep, in which the canine race are in many ways 

 serviceable. 1 I presume that the Icelanders, when slaughtering 

 their cattle, never have the dogs far off, and thereby it readily 

 happens that these voracious animals, in swallowing what is 

 thrown aside, take in various Cysticerci ; from these the Ttenia 

 serrata is developed, and their young, by means of the oxen, give 

 rise to many evil consequences to man. If the dogs of the Ice- 

 landers were kept under supervision and free from the Taenia serrata 3 

 not only would the propagation of the young of this tape-worm 

 be certainly prevented, but also their immigration into man and 

 cattle, and their injurious degeneration into Cysticerci. 



It can now be no longer regarded as wonderful, or considered 

 as fabulous, when physicians inform us that after raw meat had 

 been prescribed for certain of their patients, they had found 

 them to become troubled with tape-worms. 3 In the cases that were 

 met with, it was explicitly said to be the Taenia solium that was 

 expelled, which exactly supports the opinion that this tape-worm, 

 so rare in St. Petersburg, has there been developed by the 

 adoption of a diet of raw meat. The statements would have 

 been much more to be suspected if, in the tape-worms that were 

 passed, the Bothriocephalus latus, so general in Russia and Poland, 

 had been recognised, since this worm is never met with amongst 

 our cattle in a scolex condition. Formerly, the geographical 

 distribution of both these human tape-worms, the Bothriocephalus 



1 What important services the numerous dogs spread all over Iceland render to the 

 inhabitants in their husbandry, is given in the more or less detailed accounts of travellers. 

 Compare Hornebow, ' Zuverlassige Nachrichten von Island,' Copenhagen, 1753, pp. 143 

 and 164; further, Hooker, 'Journal of a Tour in Iceland in the Summer of 1809,' 

 London, 1813, vol. i, p. 339. 



2 Compare, upon this subject, the communications made by Weisse (in the ' Journal 

 fur Kinderkrankbeiten,' vol. xvi, 1851, p. 384), which, in spite of Braun's objections 

 (ibid., vol. xviii, 1852, p. 78 ; or in Froriep's ' Tagesberichten,' 1852 ; ' Geburtshiilfe 

 und Kinderkrankheiten,' p. 281), are worthy of all belief. The opinion expressed by 

 Andral in favour of the doctrine of equivocal generation (' Grundriss der pathol. 

 Anatomie,' Leipzig, vol. i, p. 393), that from external mechanical influences (a contusion) 

 affecting an organ, its necessary nourishment may be disturbed, so that the organic par- 

 tides are not fully assimilated, and become metamorphosed into lower kinds of animals 

 (into a Cyslicercus) an opinion in which Professor Uhde, of Brunswick, also coincides 

 (see < Deutsche Klinik.,' 1851, No. 40, p. 434) is thus thoroughly refuted. 



