OR CANINE MADNESS. 197 



amply elucidate former opinions, correct erroneous or doubtful 

 positions, and to collate new and illustrative facts. 



The necessity of a precise and clear knowledge of this direful 



but one or two rabid ones, he affects to disprove the vast mass of testimony 

 oJSered by other observant and distinguished professional characters during 

 the last century ; affirming, that by all of them the disease, in both the human 

 and brute subjects, has been equally mistaken in cause, appearance, and ef- 

 fect The facts which the unlimited opportunities aiForded to myself and 

 Mr. Youatt, enabled us to lay before the public, militated much against these 

 new views of Dr. Parry : and as the general credence given to our statements, 

 and the weight which was at that time attached to our opinions, would naturally 

 offer some hindrance to their progress, it became, therefore, a great point 

 with him to throw a disparaging shade over our writings in particular ; and 

 the consequence was, that they were neither examined with candour nor 

 contradicted with courtesy. On the contrary, to produce an appearance of 

 discordance and opposition between their several parts, he selected detached 

 and remote passages, and placed them continuously, purposely to give them 

 the appearance of a contradictory whole ; in which way it is evident that the 

 most perspicuous writer that ever put pen to paper might be betrayed into the 

 most glaring seeming inconsistencies. This dogmatic denial of palpable and 

 well-known facts is of little consequence to us, comparatively with the ex- 

 treme danger of reviving one of the most injurious errors which the barbarism 

 of former times had retained in some writings, and in some prejudices : but 

 had not Dr. P. maintained that the rabid dog dreaded water as much as the 

 hydrophobous man, he was fearful he should not establish his favourite theory, 

 that the human and brute malady are wholly the same in cause, appearance, and 

 effect. "Laryngeal spasm" is, with Dr. P., the foundation of both diseases; 

 and as the hydrophobic symptom is one resulting from this spasm in the 

 human subject, hydrophobia must necessarily be present in the dog also ; and to 

 establish the doctrine he denies testimonies the most numerous, credible, and 

 even then very generally established. Without a marked instance in which 

 this laryngeal spasm was present in the dog, he pronounces every canine case, 

 in which there is not a manifest dread of water, to be spurious ; and, in fact, 

 any disease but rabies. However, in the total absence of facts, nothing 

 remained but to resort to arguments ; and of what nature Dr. P.'s were, may 

 be gained from the following specimen, which does not stand alone in futility. 

 *' How, if no dread of liquids exists in mad dogs, came the disease to be called, 

 in all ages, hydrophobia ?" — Rab. Contag. p. 145. To which it may be replied, 

 in the first place, Has it been so called in all ages ? Has it not been already 

 shewn that the ancients had other and more appropriate designations for it ? 



