GENERAL PATHOLOGY. 63 



So among the cattle first seen by Prof. Simonds in quaran- 

 tine at Kamienica, a neighborhood which had then been free 

 from the plague for eleven years, Avere four steppe oxen, three 

 of which recovered, one having never sickened ; while of the 

 native cattle, with whom these and six other steppe oxen 

 were housed at this and an adjoining village, in sheds belong- 

 ing to the same proprietor ; thirty-one, being the whole herd 

 in one place, died within nineteen days after the steppe oxen 

 arrived : and of the other lot, which included the four first 

 mentioned, twenty-eight in all ; thirteen died and eleven were 

 slaughtered.* 



The power of contagion being limited or increased by the 

 operation of certain conditions in nature which it may be 

 difiicult to define, or by varying developments of constitu- 

 tional vigor (which may be equally vague in statement, 

 though undeniable in fact) we are prepared to understand 

 why in different climates and with different races of cattle, 

 the symptoms and the morbid, anatomy may seem doubtful 

 or conflicting in particulars, and yet center in a common 

 type, to mark the specific action of a specific virus. 



Thus, where from any predisposing or dominant cause the 

 force of the disease in its early incubation is expended on 

 the membranes investing the brain (cerebellum, principally) 

 or the spinal cord, we should expect the twitchings, nervous 

 rigors and fury, and the consequent effusions in those regions 

 observed in Hungary and Galicia by Egan and Simonds. 



Where, again, as in the few cases referred to by Prof. Gam- 

 gee, the concentrated action of the poison is seen in the tra- 

 chea and its bronchial branches, we could hardly imagine 

 relief from this obstruction of the respiratory functions in 

 time for any reaction on the intestinal canal. And where, 

 lastly, the grand onslaught of the distemper was in the latter 

 direction, w^e might reasonably look for lesions so much more 

 distinctly pronounced, that what seemed only aphthous ap- 

 pearances in other cases might in these be imagined to be 



* Perhaps a more marked case is given by Dr. Weber, as occurring at Kamionka Woloska 

 (Galicia), where 101 oxen, which were brought from Bessarabia, developed the contagion in the 

 farmsteads in the village, so that 158 animals were attacked, of which 93 died ; only one of the 

 imported oxen suffered. 



