History of Animal Plagues. 427 



bv way of analogv, in clearing up the causes of disease in man. 

 It is necessary to remark that the violence of the cold has been 

 excessive during the winter, so that animated beings have been ' 

 scarcely able to resist the energy of its attacks; we can now 

 perceive that this extreme cold has penetrated deep into the 

 bowels of the earth, and has destroyed — even to the ultimate root- 

 lets — the warmth and the life of the vegetable kingdom, and 

 which nature has ordained should be concentrated there. Those 

 trees and shrubs which seemed by age to have acquired most 

 consistence and durability have been precisely those which have 

 most readily succumbed ; the oldest vines have been devastated. 

 And so it has been with the human species. The aged, worn 

 down by years, have been deprived of the remains of their animal 

 heat which kept them alive ; the cold, an enemy to motion, 

 has succeeded in arrestinsf the blood which flowed but tardily in 

 the shrivelled vessels, and soon they ceased to live. It was ob- 

 served in the course of the preceding year, towards the month 

 of May especially, that a warm dew {i-osce chaude), which is 

 termed manna, fell in great abundance, and that the trees, the 

 vines, and the different vegetables had suffered a marked change. 

 The silk-worms were the first to experience the bad efi'ects from 

 the leaves of the mulberry trees being thus altered, and they be- 

 came very ill; from that time the turkeys, which form such a 

 large portion of the agricultural wealth in this country, and the 

 other fowls, have been variously affected until the end of the 

 winter. Before the severe colds, the horses paid their contribu- 

 tion to the epidemy which ravaged the animal kingdom ; they 

 died in large numbers from vertigo, a kind of contagious frenzy 

 which destroyed them in a few days ; neither profuse nor moder- 

 ate bleedings, enemas, nor any of the other means at the disposal 

 of our hippiatrists, could arrest the course or ameliorate the 

 furious rapidity of this affection, which quickly terminated in 

 death. So virulent was the contagion, that, from the moment a 

 horse was attacked in a stable, not onlv were the others which 

 stood in the same building quick in receiving it from the diseased 

 one, if they were not speedily removed, but the infection lingered 

 in it for many weeks afterwards, and was not slow in attacking 

 horses which miirht be stabled therein duriug this time; so that it 



