334 History of Animal Plagues. 



then had its due and full effect on the parts j and the state in which 

 they will then be must proportionably fail to answer the description 

 above given. 



' A very stinking air, and sometimes matter, rushes out on piercing 

 the skin, or making an opening into the cavity of the belly; particularly 

 if there be swellings on the back, and the skin be pricked or cut in that 

 part. The mouth, throat, and gullet are red ; and full of small specks, 

 or ulcers, attended with the appearance of what is called the thrush in 

 children. The lungs are red, ulcerated, speckled with blackish spots, 

 and sometimes fraught with small bladders of fluid-like water. The 

 liver is swollen, full of dark yellow gall, and rotten, so as scarcely to 

 bear the touch ; and the gall-bladder is stretched to a large size by 

 greenish gall. The cud-bag, or paunch, is red and discoloured with 

 blackish spots, putfed up with air to a very great magnitude, and void 

 of any fluid, but containing a hard mass of cud, which has remained 

 there and is become dry, instead of passing to the other intestines to be 

 digested. The honey-comb, manilold, and curd-bag are in much the 

 same state with the cud-bag, except as to the various degrees of hard- 

 ness and dryness of the cud in the two first, and that the curd-bag is 

 empty. The smaller guts are spotted with red and black ; and the 

 end of the rectum or last gut, for some space above the anus or funda- 

 ment, is black, rotten, and foul with clotted blood on its surface. The 

 womb is red and enlarged in cows that are not pregnant, but in those 

 with calf it is blackish. The fat, where any can be found, is of a high 

 yellow colour and soft consistence. Collections or gatherings of matter 

 are frequently met with in the cavities of the horns and head. When 

 the greatest part of these appearances present themselves in the respect- 

 ive parts on opening the beasts which have died after the principal of 

 the above symptoms have been observed in them, there can be no room 

 to doubt but that they have had the murrain. Even where any accurate 

 information may be wanting of the nature of their illness, there is a very 

 strong ground of conclusion that it was this disease, if, on the examina- 

 tion of the carcases soon after the beasts are dead, the eruptions, par- 

 ticularly the hard boils along the back, the scabbiness on the nose and 

 barbs, the puffing up of the skin or belly with stinking air, the gathering 

 of matter in the horns and head, the dry mass in the cud-bag, the black- 

 ness of the womb, and the rottenness of the gut next the fundament, or 

 most of them, are found. 



'The symptoms and eff^ects of the murrain, which may be deemed, 

 less properly than the foregoing, the subject of the examination of per- 

 sons not conversant in medicinal subjects, and less apparently the cha- 

 racteristic marks of the disease, but which may yet afibrd material lights 



