NATURE OF GLANDERS. 301 



fifteen weeks' interval between his exposure to the contagion and 

 the actual eruption of disease ] Was it circulating in his blood ] 

 and, if so, why did it not, as in the cases of the Colonel's chargers 

 and A 24 horse, shew itself before 1 After so long an interval it 

 is hardly possible to conceive the disease, when it did appear, could 

 be local. Rather would it seem that, notwithstanding the blood is 

 contaminated, yet does no topical eruption happen until such time 

 as certain parts or localities have acquired a jjredisposition to ad- 

 mit of the eruption. Should the animal, whose system is supposed 

 to be already infected, contract a catarrh or have the strangles, the 

 certainty is, that either one or the other will turn to glanders; or 

 should he get swelled legs or injure his limbs in any way, the lesion 

 or tumefaction will surely turn to farcy. After all we can say or 

 surmise, however, on this abstruse subject, there is that strange, 

 unaccountable caprice, as regards their effects, about contagions 

 and the poisons or viruses of contagion, that defies all science or 

 art to bring their action within the compass of any known laws or 

 principles: we can only adduce facts — or what appear to us to be 

 such — and by them, and them alone, we must be guided in the nar- 

 row circle Avherein we dare reason upon them, and out of which 

 we dare not permit our reason to wander. 



Of the Nature of the (so-called) Virus of Glanders we 

 know no more than we do concerning the supposed viruses or poi- 

 sons of syphilis, rabies, variolus, vaccinea, &c. : we have the same 

 ground for arguing the existence of virus as there is for doing so 

 in the diseases just named, and no more; all the knowledge we 

 possess in regard to the virus of glanders arising out of the obser- 

 vations we have been enabled to make of its operation and effects. 

 Indemonstrable, however, as the virus is in any abstract, palpable 

 form, yet have we no conception, at least according to the views 

 we take of the pathology of glanders, of the existence of the dis- 

 ease without its presence. We do not imagine, as we said on a 

 former occasion, that simply an unhealthy or ill-conditioned state of 

 body can give rise to glanders or farcy. We believe that the 

 specific virus must, in some form or another, somewhere or other 

 exist. 



