THE MIASM OF THE STABLE. 241 



Let us examine these alleged facts, together with the ingenious 

 and plausible arguments our late Professor founded upon them. 



Coleman's talents were of an order that gifted him with a ready 

 and acute perception of things in general, enabling him often to 

 discover cause and design where, to those around, all seemed 

 buried in mystery. This penetrative and fertile genius of his, how- 

 ever, would at times lead him beyond the limits of fair and legiti- 

 mate deduction into regions of theorization where his best friends 

 felt loth to accompany him : he had at the offset, perhaps, framed 

 a pretty and truth-looking theory ; but too often would he mar the 

 fair image he had created by loading it with more accountability 

 than it was able to sustain. Thus it was with the point of hippo- 

 pathology now before us. He succeeded in proving to the minds 

 of most, if not of all veterinarians of his time, that the poison or 

 miasm of the stable was a fruitful source of glanders and farcy, and 

 that it was especially operative when those diseases broke out, and 

 on a sudden, in an epidemic form; but he refused to admit the 

 influence of contagion in any case, save where actual contact and 

 abrasion, tantamount altogether to inoculation, could be proved to 

 have taken place. In every other instance of alleged contagion 

 brought before him he could discover some want of ventilation, 

 some source of "poison;" and to such an extent did he carry the 

 omnipresence of this suppositious poison, that I have heard him 

 say that horses at pasture even might, by sniffing over parcels of 

 dung or places wetted by urine, in the open fields, inhale it in as 

 efficacious a form as though they had inspired it generated in 

 their stables. Consistently with which notions so far did he carry 

 his plans of ventilation, that he thought open sheds in straw-yards 

 should have apertures for the admission of pure and the emission 

 of impure air, the same as stables themselves. And yet, non-con- 

 tagionist as Coleman was in his opinions, the regulations issued 

 from time to time at his suggestion for the guidance of the veteri- 

 nary surgeons of the army were, in their nature, as effectually cal- 

 culated to prevent the spread of the disease by contagion as any 

 one of an opposite way of thinking could possibly desire, as will 

 appear by the subjoined extract from them, received by me in the 

 month of October, 1837»: — 



