NATURAL DEATH IN THE ANIMAL WORLD 155 



the bones of a seal, walrus, or bird which has met a 

 natural death. 



This disappearance of the dead, so remarkable in 

 itself, must, we think, be left out of account in the 

 endeavour to ascertain the causes of decease. These 

 must be sought, not by coroner's inquest, when too 

 often there is no body which the jury can view, but by 

 argument from the known causes of death among 

 domestic animals, and the numerous, if scattered, 

 records of mortality among wild ones, notes of which 

 have often been carefully preserved, and may be found 

 at intervals through the history of the last ten centuries. 

 Most of these are the records of epidemics, but these 

 and similar diseases must be held to be at work from 

 year's end to year's end, even when not so violent as to 

 cause remark ; while concurrently there are among 

 animals a large class of ailments causing natural death 

 exactly analogous to those leading to human mortality. 



Among these normal, non-epidemic causes of death 

 many must be common both to wild and to domesticated 

 species. c Distemper ' among dogs and cats probably 

 extends also to foxes, wolves, and the wild felidas. Its 

 course is often exactly like that of a wasting low-fever, 

 and animals die from it in precisely the same way as a 

 human patient suffering from malaria or bilious fever, 

 for the symptoms are not always the same. ' Chill ' 

 kills dogs, often by jaundice, and horses and cows 



