'ilO GLANDERS. 



troops at Hythe, and inhabited before the walls were perfectly diy, many 

 of the horses that had been removed from an open, diy, and healthy 

 situation, became aflected with glanders ; but, some time having passed 

 over, the horses in these stables were as healthy as the others, and glan- 

 ders ceased to appear. An innkeeper at Wakefield built some extensive 

 stabling for his horses, and inhabiting them too soon, lost a great pro- 

 portion of his cattle from glanders. There are not now more healthy 

 stables in the place. The immense range of stables under the Adelphi, 

 in the Strand, where light never enters, and the supply of fresh air is not too 

 abundant, were for a long time notoriously unhealthy, and many valuable 

 horses we^^e destroyed by glanders ; but now they are filled with the 

 finest waggon and dray-horses that the metropolis or the country con- 

 tains, and they are fully as healthy as in the majority of stables above- 

 ground. 



There is one more cause to be slightly mentioned — hereditary predispo- 

 sition. This has not been sufficiently estimated, ^Yiih. regard to the ques- 

 tion now under consideration, as well as with respect to everything 

 connected with the breeding of the horse. There is scarcely a disease 

 that does not run in the stock. There is that in the structure of various 

 23arts, or their disposition to be affected by certain influences, which per- 

 petuates in the off"spring the diseases of the sire ; and thus contraction, 

 ophthalmia, roaring, are decidedly hereditary, and so is glanders. M. 

 Dupuy relates some decisive cases. A mare, on dissection, exhibited 

 every appearance of glanders ; her filly, who resembled her in form and in 

 her vicious propensities, died glandered at six years old. A second and 

 a third mare and their foals presented the same fatal proof that glanders 

 is hereditary. 



Glanders is highly contagious. The farmer cannot be to deeply im- 

 pressed with the certainty of this. Considering the degree to which this 

 disease, even at the present day, often prevails, the legislature would be 

 justified in interfering by some severe enactments, as it has done in the 

 case of the small-pox in the human subject. 



The early and marked symptom of glanders is a discharge from the 

 nostrils of a peculiar character ; and if that, even before it becomes pui-u- 

 lent, is rubbed on a wound, or on a mucous surface, as the nostrils, it will 

 produce a similar disease. If the division between two horses were suffi- 

 ciently high to prevent all smelling and snorting at each other and contact 

 of every kind, and they drank not out of the 'same pail, a sound horse 

 might five for years, uninfected, by the side of a glandered one. The 

 matter of glanders has been mixed up into a ball, and given to a healthy 

 horse, without effect. Some horses have eaten the hay left by those that 

 were glandered, and no bad consequence has followed ; but others have 

 been speedily infected. The glanderous matter must come in contact with 

 a wound, or fall on some membrane, thin and delicate like that of the nose, 

 and through which it may be absorbed. It is easy, then, accustomed as 

 horses are to be crowded together, and to recognise each other by the 

 smell — eating out of the same manger, and drinking from the same pail — 

 to imagine that the disease may be very readily commujiicated. One horse 

 has passed another when he was in the act of snorting, and has become 

 glandered. Some fillies have received the contagion from the matter 

 blown by the wind across a lane, when a glandered horse, in the opposite 

 field, has claimed acquaintance by neighing or snoi-tlng. It is almost im- 

 possible for a glandered horse to remain long in a stable with others 

 \\dthout irreparable mischief. 



If some persons underrate the danger, it is because the disease may 

 remain unrecognised in the infected horse for some months, or even years, 



