120 PLAGUE-STRUCK ANIMALS 



in New York, where it first appeared among the 

 horses. In London, horses, cats, dogs, pigeons, parrots 

 and penguins died of influenza. In the year 1800, 

 when yellow fever reached Cadiz and Seville, dogs took 

 the disease more freely than other animals ; but cats, 

 horses, poultry and cage-birds also died. The symptoms 

 in the case of the dogs and cats resembled those in man. 

 The animals were not attacked until the deaths among 

 men numbered two hundred a day. In 1830, when 

 the cattle, fowls and geese of South Russia died of 

 cholera, the appearance of the disease was also sub- 

 sequent to its development among human beings. 



Animal epidemics taking place simultaneously with 

 human pestilence are immensely aggravated by the 

 impossibility of separating infected and non-infected 

 cattle. The herdsmen die, and the flocks and herds 

 run wild. But this does not account for the deadly 

 character of animal epidemics in general, or for the 

 little resistance offered by animal constitutions to such 

 diseases. Human beings are usually prepared by long 

 unwholesome living. Compare the account of the 

 Bombay native house dark, with the floor soaked 

 with dirt, and the free water left always dripping from 

 the tap by the inmates and Erasmus's description of the 

 floor of an English cottage, ' made of nothing but loam, 

 and strewed with rushes, which being constantly put on 

 fresh, without a removal of the old, remain lying there, 



