544 History of Animal Plagues. 



perished from this disease, and two of these he particularly ob- 

 served threw up, by repeated and severe retchings, a yellow fetid 

 matter. The bodies of these animals, as death began to approach, 

 assumed more and more of a yellowish tinge. (The epidemics 

 in man, in America and elsewhere, at this time, were remarkable 

 for their bilious complications.) 



' Lastly, it was after this succession of symptoms that the cats 

 affected by the epizooty perished, — an event which ordinarily 

 took place on the fourth or fifth day after being attacked. A 

 personal remark we may here make is, that from the second day 

 of the disease it was very difficult to draw any electric sparks 

 from these*animals by frictions on the back. The post-mortem 

 examinations have revealed gangrenous patches in the whole of 

 the viscera, but particularly in the stomach and intestines. The 

 nostrils, the mouth, the oesophagus, the trachea, the lungs, and 

 also the intestines, were full of a serous and mucus matter, 

 which was sometimes white, sometimes yellow, and at other 

 times blood-coloured, I shall not mention the many other 

 alterations that I found after death in those I opened. Professor 

 Halle has found a purulent mass of matter at the base of the 

 brain, near the ethmoid bone, and the gall-bladder very distended, 

 in a cat which he opened. This disease has been observed in 

 the department of the Lower Seine by citizen Cloquet; it has 

 also reigned at Bordeaux, Strasburg, and other places,' ' The 

 past year (1798), as I was walking through the forests in the 

 neighbourhood of the menagerie of the National Venerie (at 

 Turin), I came upon the dead bodies of two wild cats which 

 appeared to have died recently. So far as I could judge by the 

 foam and saliva about their mouths, by the discharge from their 

 noses, as well as from the alterations observable in their viscera, 

 I was of opinion that they had been the victims of the same 

 malady which had destroyed the domestic cats. My conjectures 

 acquired yet greater probability after I had questioned a sports- 

 man on the subject, for he assured me that the mortality was 

 then very great among wild cats. The Society of Agriculture, 

 and also that of Medicine at Paris, was informed that the 

 epizooty, which is the subject of this memoir, so far from hav- 

 ing disappeared, had recommenced its ravages in some depart- 



