2i0 



DISEASES OF SHEEP. 



the place of their nativity, and therefore may be eaten 

 with impunity. 



II. Supposing the eggs to have reached the sheep's 

 stomach in a condition to allow of their being hatched, 

 they, according to popular voice, find their way into 

 the gall bladder by one of two routes. 



1. Mr King, the gentleman above spoken of, con- 

 jectures, in the same paper, that the fluke, after leav- 

 ing the egg in the stomach of the sheep, makes its way 

 up the gall vessels. This is, I am sorry to say, a very 

 idle conjecture, as, from the valvular nature of the 

 opening of the gall duct into the duodenum, an en- 

 trance from that intestine to the gall bladder is per- 

 fectly impracticable to any of the entozoa.* 



2. The eggs are believed by a writer in the Letters of 

 the Bath Society of Agriculture, for 1781, to be taken 

 into the blood along with the chyle from the small 

 intestines, and to be arrested in the liver by the secre- 

 tory ducts. This, it must be clear to every one, is the 

 most absurd of all the notions ; for if a globule of 

 blood, which we must suppose to be the largest body 

 capable of being absorbed from the intestine, is only 

 about s-Q^^ of an inch in diameter, how can the egg of 

 a fluke worm pass through the same channel, when Mr 

 King has, by careful observation, shown it to be -^^ of 

 an inch in its shortest measurement. Again, allowing 



* The notion that rot is occasioned by animalcules getting into the 

 liver is not confined to this country. Leake, in liis travels in the 

 Morea, alludes to an opinion prevalent there, that the v-dhHa (rot) is 

 caused by the sheep feeding in marshy places in August and September, 

 when it is imagmed that an insect from the plants finds its way into 

 the biliary vessels. 



