Histojy of Animal Plagues. 15 



A similar pestilence raged in Persia, Egypt, Libya, and 

 Ethiopia. 



B.C. 399. A great epizootv at Rome is described by Livv. 

 'The year was remarkable for its stormy and frosty winter; so 

 severe. was it that the Tiber was unnavigable. Either in con- 

 sequence of the unseasonableness of the weather — a sudden 

 change having taken place, or from some other cause, a trying, 

 and to all animals a pestilential, summer, succeeded the terrible 

 winter. Neither the cause nor the termination of this incurable 

 mortality could be divined In the former year an un- 

 bearable and almost miraculous winter set in ; in the following 

 year pestilence raged through town and country, as though the 

 angry gods were venting their displeasure.' ^ 



It is somewhat strano;e that Aristotle, who lived about this 

 period, did not give any detailed description of epizootic diseases 

 in his History of Animals. He mentions scabies, canine mad- 

 ness, and arthritis — a disease endemic and enzootic in Greece, 

 and the only one, according to this writer, to which the unbroken 

 droves of horses wandering over the plains were liable. Some 

 of the maladies of animals are enumerated by him, such as 

 tetanus, the iliac passion, and phthisis of cattle, but the great 

 animal plagues are forgotten, if we except the one termed mal'is 

 which, he says, was peculiar to the ass species. This word was 

 used by the Greeks to signify the most serious diseases of ani- 

 mals, in something the same manner as the word lo'imos was 

 employed to distinguish the pestilential maladies of man. 



The malls manifested itself principally by a discharge of thick 

 mucosities from the nostrils, and it was believed the seat of the 

 disease was usually in the head. ' If the malady reached the chest,' 

 says Aristotle, ' they died, but if it was confined to the head it 

 could be cured.' The etymology of the word signified nothing 

 more than a glanderous discharge, and the Romans translated or 

 rendered it by the term projbw'ium attlcum, a disease, or rather 

 a symptom, according to them, nearly always fatal in animals, 

 but which characterized more particularly what we now term 

 ' glanders ' in horses and asses. 



Oi). cit. V. 13—15. 



