292 History of Animal Plagues. 



proceeded merely from the violence of the fever, which causes 

 an entire defect of the juice that is naturally secreted there for 

 the moistening and lubricating the food and the paunch; for 

 want of which juice I can easily conceive the dry food to be 

 capable of being baked by the preternatural heat of the body. 

 .... The excessive mortality of the present distemper under 

 every method of cure in its beginning is sufficient to prove its 

 malignity, if anything can ; and from the degree of its malignity, 

 I think we may safely infer the species of it. For as pestilential 

 malignity is the most mortal of all others, and no malignity was 

 scarce ever more mortal than this among the cattle, it is surely 

 good logic to infer that the malignity of the present dis- 

 temper is no other than pestilential I am of opinion, 



that as the pathognomonic sign of the distemper described by 

 Severinus was a sore-throat, so the distinguishing one of this 

 among the cattle is a peripneumony, or inflammation of the lungs. 

 Neither is this sign of a peripneumony less familiar to a plague 

 than any other topical inflammation is . . . I will not pretend to 

 say there are no aphthae in this general inflammation, they being 

 very common in many inflammatory disorders, where they are 

 not the pathognomonic; but that the general and most obvious 

 sympton)s of this distemper are such as belong to a peripneu- 

 mony, will not be controverted by any physician who has either 



seen it or heard any description of it I will only add one 



thing more concerning the learned author^s determination, which 

 is, that with submission to him I think a pestilential peripneu- 

 mony is a more discriminating name for this disease than a 

 gangrenous contagious one ; for the most striking circumstance in 

 this calamity, the prodigious mortality of it, is not so thoroughly 

 implied in the author's two epithets, as it is in the one I have 

 given it, which likewise expresses every circumstance implied in 

 loth those of the learned author. ... It cannot, I imagine, 

 be denied that to give contagion a power of infecting an animal, 

 there must be a disposition in the animal itself to be acted upon, 

 as well as in the contagion to act upon it. For if the simple 

 power of contagion was able to infect, it would not be possible 

 for any animal that lived within its reach to escape its influence; 

 but it is a known truth that some escape it who live in the midst 



