VARIETIES OF GLANDERS. 185 



in which the disease has been, either unceasingly or in relapses.' 

 creeping on all the while, have arrived at a point of disorganization 

 to fail in their functions, and so to create constitutional irritation*. 

 So long as the glanders remains chronic or inactive in the system, 

 months, years even, may pass away without any material change : 

 the moment, however, any thing occurs to derange the health, 

 the disease re-appears in all its virulence, and then speedily runs 

 on to the destruction of the patient. In many of these cases, how- 

 ever, symptoms of failure will a long while be apparent before the 

 final break-up arrives: the glandered horse will be daily observed 

 to lose his usual health and spirits, his coat no longer of healthy 

 aspect, will draw out, and he will perceptibly fail in his strength, and 

 fall away in his condition. All on a sudden, a fresh eruption of dis- 

 charge will shew itself from his nose, the membrane will be found 

 to have changed colour, the glands under his jaw to have become 

 augmented, his hind legs swollen, farcy broken out perhaps all over 

 his body, acute glanders and farcy, in fine, displayed in all their 

 virulence, to end before long, in despite of any thing that can be 

 done, in the destruction of life : not, however, as I have so recently 

 described, through suffocation, but through consumption of the 

 lungs by the disease, assisted by a wearing hectic sort of fever, the 

 same as is seen in human phthisis puhnonalis ; and, moreover, 

 bearing a resemblance to that mode of ending life, inasmuch as the 

 brute, as well as the man, retains his senses to the last. 



EPIDEMIC or ENDEMIC GLANDERS amounts to no- 

 thing more than extraordinary prevalence of the disease among 

 horses in general, or among the horses of some particular localit}^ 

 referrible either to some peculiarity in the breed of the horse, or in 

 the soil or air of the place he inhabits^ So far, however, as causes 

 are concerned, they will become matter of future consideration : 

 all that we have to consider in this place is the question of diflfer- 

 ence, if there be any, between the epidemic disease and ordinary 

 glanders. I believe the former almost always to assume the 

 acute, generally the acutest form ; nay, in many instances the 

 typhoid or malignant type : farther than this I know, of my own 

 experience and reading, no difference between epidemic or endemic 



* I have more than once remarked that the disease has confined its ravages 

 to the Umgs of the side correspondent with the affected nostril. 



