DOGS: THEIR MANAGEMENT. 311 



from this category the muscular system ; but such per- 

 sons forget that paralysis of the hind extremities is often 

 present during rabies. The body seems to be yielded 

 up to the fury of the disease, and it obviously would be 

 folly trying to cure a malady which has so many and 

 such various organs for its prey. Neither are we better 

 informed with regard to the causes which generate the 

 disease. Hot weather has been imagined to influence its 

 development ; but this belief is denied, by the fact that 

 mad dogs are quite as if rot more, frequent in winter 

 than in summer. Abstinence from fluids has been 

 thought to provoke it ; but this circumstance will hardly 

 account for its absence in the arid East, and its presence 

 in a country so well watered as England, especially 

 when the unscrupulous nature of the dog's appetite is 

 considered. The French have been supposed to set 

 this latter question at rest by a cruelty, miscalled an ex- 

 periment. They obtained forty dogs, and withheld all 

 drink from the unhappy beasts till they died. Not one 

 of them, however, exhibited rabies, and by this the 

 French philosophers think that they have demonstrated 

 that the disorder is not caused by want of water. No 

 such thing ; they have proved only their want of feel- 

 ing, and show nothing more than that one out of every 

 forty dogs is not liable to be attacked with rabies. They 

 have demonstrated that the utmost malice of the human 

 being can be vented upon his poor dumb slave without 

 exciting rabies. They have made plain that the poor 

 dog can endure the most hellish torments the mind of 



