400 



History of Animal Plagues. 



wealthy In possessing immense herds of these creatures, were 

 reduced to extreme poverty. The writer who describes it was 

 perfectly convinced that this reindeer plague was the same as 

 that which attacked the cattle in 1750-51, and which came by 

 infection from Norway to Jemtland. He gives the following 

 account of it: 'The symptoms are — the head is drooping, the 

 mouth feels dry, the horns are cold, and sometimes there is 

 great shivering or nervous twitchings; the eyes are watery, 

 and the tears flow; there is a watery mucus discharge from 

 the nose ; the saliva is viscid, profuse, and dribbling from the 

 mouth, which is covered internally with dark-blue or black 

 spots, and its whole lining membrane is of a dusky colour. 

 The animals have constipation. When the disease has reached 

 its heio-ht the eyes becjin to suppurate, and the mucus is viscid, 

 purulent, and foul-smelling, and sometimes tinged with blood; 

 the mouth becomes perfectly black, with spots, bladders, and 

 pimples, and the odour from it is very offensive; the breath- 

 ing is slow and heavy, and the desire to eat and to ruminate 

 is lost; they stand trembling upon their feet; the eyeballs be- 

 come green, and the beasts stagger and drag themselves along 

 the fields without eating or drinking; they cough and snort a 

 good deal, until at last, after a few weeks, they die. On an 

 examination of those which perish in this way, the throat, 

 bowels, liver, and other viscera are found black and red- 

 coloured, from gangrene. The lungs are observed to be 

 wasted.'^ 



Its contagious properties were undoubted, and it sufficed to 

 put a healthy reindeer in the harness of a diseased one, or to 

 milk a female deer, yet unaffected, with the same hand which 

 had milked a sick one, to produce the malady. Even those deer 

 which happened to smell at the urine or the excrement of the 

 infected were promptly attacked. It was then important, accord- 

 ing to this author, to keep apart the healthy, and to burn around 

 them juniper branches, taking care even to exclude the people 

 who looked after the sick animals. It was also necessary to inter 

 the dead in deep pits without skinning them, and to have these 

 graves far from the roads pursued by reindeer yet unaffected. 

 1 Gissler. Abliandl. der Schwed. Akad., vol. xxi. 286. 



