History of Animal Plagues. o^'^^ 



for discovering the true nature and the indications of cure of it, are 

 those which follow. 



' In the first stage, heat, but not great, in the head, and particularly 

 at the roots of the horns, attended with a coolness of the body and the 

 extremities 3 hot and stinking breath j deafness 3 pulse quicker than in 

 health, the strokes being from sixty to seventy, but irregular, though 

 without stated remissions. 



' In die second stage, sisrns of sickness : ' breath more hot and stink- 

 ingj fetid steams from the skin; respiration ditficult, particularly ex- 

 piration laboured and performed with groaning; urine high-coloured 

 and turbid, but generally without any deposit of sediment, or any bad 

 smell, and retained longer than in health, though not in the whole 

 much ditferent in quantity ; dung acrimonious or sharp to such a degree 

 as to leave a visible irritation for some time after in the anus ; blood 

 florid; seeming exacerbations of pain in the evening; a constant dis- 

 position to lie, but attended with such uneasiness in some that they 

 stand almost continually, though Mith great difficulty on account of 

 their weakness ; an absence of thirst throughout the whole disorder, 

 though with a willingness to drink in moderation ; pulse increasing in 

 quickness, according to the progress of the disease, from seventy to 

 ninety, and having periodical diurnal remissions as in the paroxysms of 

 fevers, but irregular, intermitting, and growing smaller as the velocity 

 becomes greater. 



' On opening the carcases of beasts dead of the murrain, these ap- 

 pearances will occur, together with those before enumerated : — In the 

 brain, the blood-vessels are found turgid and very red, and clots of 



' Doctor Layard has mentioned, along with the sickness, the throwing up of 

 bile as one of the symptoms of the murrain. He does not intimate that he has 

 seen it himself, but refers for it, in a note, to Aretseus 'De Morbis Acutis.' The 

 notion of such a fact was a most palpable error in the first broacher of it, whoever 

 he were ; and it is a great inadvertence in the Doctor to adopt it ; as he has him- 

 self, in more than one part of his treatise, insisted on the iinpossibility of neat cattle 

 vomiting at all, on account of the formation of their intestines. Professor Camper 

 has, indeed, seemed to contradict this opinion by the relation of a fact. For he 

 declares that giving a decoction of camomile has made the beasts vomit. If that 

 did happen, however, it cannot be supposed to be any other vomiting than the re- 

 turning the fluid into the mouth from the cud-bag only, by the same action as the 

 cud is brought back thither in order to rumination ; which could have no effect 

 towards forcing up bile. Whoever considers that the bile must pass through all 

 the four stomachs in its way from the duodenum to the mouth, must be satisfied 

 that it is next to an impossibility any such thing should happen. It is most rational 

 to believe that if a discharge from the mouth of anything reseml)ling bile, on a 

 slight inspection, has been observed, it was only of some yellow cud mixed with a 

 large proportion of fluid, and mistaken for bile in default of stricter examination. 



