PUNISHMENT BY MAN. 363 



mals that might otherwise have continued to minister to 

 man's comforts. 



Let us pause, however, before we congratulate ourselves 

 that these days of superstitious ignorance have gone by that 

 such sacrifices of devil-possessed cats or dogs are things of 

 the past, characteristics of the ' dark ' ages. In England 

 so lately as 1829, it is stated that there was a trial by jury 

 of a horse that had been the cause of a fatal accident to its 

 master. The trial of ' Yarrow ' and its master in Scotland, 

 as described or referred to by Sir Walter Scott and the 

 Ettrick Shepherd, must have happened about the same time, 

 and one of the notes to ' Waverley ' relates to the trial of a 

 cow for ale-tippling and tipsiness. 



So lately as November, 1876, only two months subsequent 

 to one of the congresses in that city of the ' British Associa- 

 tion for the Promotion of Science' a congress that had, 

 however, in its discussion on c Spiritualism,' exposed to 

 public view the morbid credulity even of men of undoubted 

 scientific attainments Glasgow, collegiate and wealthy, that 

 prides itself on being the second city of the British Empire, 

 by means of its police massacred no less than 1,200 dogs. 

 And for what reason ? Because it was feared that some of 

 these poor animals might become rabid ; that if they became 

 rabid they would bite man ; that if man were so bitten he 

 would inevitably be affected with hydrophobia ; and that hy- 

 drophobia is a certainly fatal and horrible disease. The im- 

 mediate cause of the slaughter was the fact that three men 

 had died of so-called * hydrophobia ' in the Royal Infirmary 

 of Glasgow, within a period of a few weeks. 



But the popular panic was based on a series of false as- 

 sumptions, and therefore of false fears. For rabies is rare in the 

 dog, at least in Scotland, so much so that very few practi- 

 tioners, veterinary or medical, ever saw a genuine case ; 

 hydrophobia in man is equally rare there ; and both in Scot- 

 land, and elsewhere, when hydrophobia does occur in man 

 there is seldom proof of the rabidity of the dog that bit, or 

 that was supposed to have bitten, the patient. The peculiar 

 phenomena of the disease are, in the majority of cases at 



