198 CAUSES OF GLANDERS. 



the mules that were in our employ as bat animals. To what such 

 dread changes were owing — why a country at one time said to be 

 free from any such disease should, some years afterwards, become, 

 as it were, the very focus of contamination — is a fact wliich, if I 

 mistake not, may prove of some importance to us in the investiga- 

 tion we are about to make into the exciting causes of glanders. 



Wet and Cold are at all times prejudicial to horses' constitu- 

 tions, and especially to those either very young or very old ; and 

 though the better their feed the less they are likely to suffer under 

 such exposure, yet will these agents predispose and be very apt to 

 lay the foundation for pulmonary, mesenteric, and glandular 

 disease, which, in the end, will produce farcy and glanders. 



Before we proceed to the consideration of the second class of 

 causes, viz. 



THE EXCITING CAUSES, it will be well for us to inform 

 ourselves of the opinions of such veterinary writers, foreign as well 

 as British, as appear to have paid much attention to the subject, 

 and particularly to that all-important branch of it, contagion ; a 

 branch which, at one period of time, has had supporters on all sides, 

 while at another it has been left almost without any. These I 

 shall arrange in the order of the date of their respective works. 



SOLLEYSELL, 1669, pronounced glanders to be "the most con- 

 tagious distemper to which horses are obnoxious ; for not only," 

 says he, " does it communicate its venom at a small distance, but 

 it infects the very air, and seizes on all horses that are under the 

 same roof with him that languishes from it." — " There are (how- 

 ever) several kinds of glanders, some of which are not so extremely 

 infectious as others ; though there are none that ought not to be 

 suspected*.'* 



De Saunier, 1734, regards glanders as highly contagious ; and 

 commands that the mangers, racks, &c. of glandered stables be 

 destroyed. He thinks there are forms in which the disease is 

 communicable even at a considerable distance!. 



Lafosse, senior, 1749, is said to have been a non-contagionist; 



♦ The Compleat Horseman: Hope's Translation, second edition, 1717. 

 f Parfaite Connoissance des Chevaux. 



