History of Animal Plagues. y 



(a.m. 39/2.) In Ireland it is mentioned that 'every cow 

 that was calved in FindoU's reign was white-headed.'^ 



B.C. 1 200. During the reign of Minos, the island of ^Egina 

 was visited bv a plague which did fearful injury to living crea- 

 tures, and which Ovid has most graphically described. M, 

 Paulet imagines the disease to have been a form of gangrenous 

 sore-throat, accompanied by acute fever, and perhaps erysipelas, 

 and of a contagious nature. The cause of it, of course, was the 

 wrath of an enraged god, though the long-continued heat and 

 damp state of the weather, predisposing to malignant and 

 putrid disease, is not overlooked in the description. The poet^ 

 makes the distressed ^Eacus relate its commencement and 

 course. Dogs, birds, sheep, and oxen, as well as wild creatures, 

 were attacked by the pestilence before mankind, a fact worthy 

 of notice in this poem, which, as might be expected, bears traces 

 of exacrcreration and fanciful description, mixed up with much 

 that must have been gathered from observation. 



The early Greek historians have left but few records of pesti- 

 lential diseases among the domestic animals. The fathers of 

 medicine may have bestowed more attention on the maladies 

 incidental to their own species than to those of the creatures they 

 had domesticated, and thus neglected the study of the diseases to 

 which they were liable. But perhaps the principal reason why 

 epizootic affections are not alluded to arose from their rarit)', the 

 natural salubrity of the climate of Greece, and the isolated situa- 

 tion of its various islands, which afforded but little opportunity 

 for the origin or diffusion of general affections. Hippocrates, 

 who appears to have collected all the medical knowledge existing 

 before his time, and who often examined dead animals, scarcely 

 notices the diseases peculiar to them. In one passage, he ob- 

 serves that goats and sheep are very liable to epilepsy {Lib. de 

 Morbo Sacro), probably due to hydatids on the brain; in 

 another it is remarked that cattle are much disposed to luxations 

 of the hip [Lib. de Articulis); and most remarkable of all, he 

 refers to oxen, sheep, and swine as infested by hydatids, when 

 endeavouring to prove that dropsy in man often de])euds on 



' Book of Lecan. "^ Metamorphoses, Book vii. 



