324 ArrE,\Dix.. — d. 



tloo-d-y-^ |)rili:i1)Iy owe their names to the fancied prevalence 

 of it ib-en."^ But it is now sufficiently notorious that rabies is not 

 more common at f)ne season than another.t 



" The quality and quantitij of the food has been assigned as a 

 cause of rabies ; but in dogs which have been accidentally sub- 

 jected to a deprivation of food, bordering upon starvation, i! 

 never yet took place. Neither has repletion ever occasioned 

 it, although it has proved the parent of many other inflammatory 

 arfections. Putrid food has been fully proved to have no title 

 to generating it ; neither would it, a 'priori, be likely to produce 

 it in predatiny animals, whose stomachs must, by nature, bo 

 f )rced to sul)sist on matter in various stages of decomposition, 

 lu Lisbon, in Constantinople, and other Eastern cities, dugs 

 are the only scavengers ; and, at the Cape of Good Hope, 

 Bavrow informs us, the Caifres feed their dogs wholly on pu- 

 trid flesh, and no such disease is seen among them. Absti- 

 nence from water is an old and popular supposed cause of 

 madness ; but, in India, where, from the drying of the water- 

 taiflvs, many brutes perish, and in Northern latitudes, wliere 

 the supplies are frozen, yet madness is not observed to be the 

 consequence of either. In fact, in the rage for experiment, 

 dogs have been purposely subjected to all these supposed 

 causes, but without having once produced the disease. It is 

 unnecessary to combat the ojainion of Dr. Mead and others, 

 that an acrid state of blood, from the want of perspiration in 

 the dog, is a remote cause of madness. Neither have we more 

 reason to suppose that any state or peculiarity of atmosphere 



* This is an error: they are called dog-days hecaiise of the predominance of 

 the star " Sirius'"— the dog-star of the ancients. 



t It is perhaps well here to observe, that in the coldest winter weather at 

 Quebec, and throughout Upper Canada, hydrophobia is at least as prevalent as 

 in the hot weather. The same is notorious of New York, although we never 

 hear of boys being carefully indoctrinated into cruelty and brutality, and 

 trained toward future murder, by d>^cree of the City Fathers at Christmas, 

 though at that period, rewards for dog-slaughter are just as much required as 

 in July. 



