348 GENERAL HEALTH, INFLUENCES [BOOK II. 



that some horses are more liable to incur contagious 

 diseases than others, and this in a depree propor- 

 tioned to the state of the blood at the time of com- 

 munication; so that some might escape with im- 

 punity, whilst others meet with certain death from 

 the self-same cause. This accounts for the greater 

 virulence with which some horses incur glanders, 

 for example, compared to what others suffer, which 

 catch the disorder at the same moment of time ; as 

 was proved on a largish sort of a scale, and that 

 pretty well known among practitioners, during the 

 late war on the continent. The case was briefly 

 this — A transport with cavalry horses on board, on 

 its way to the Netherlands, met with bad weather, 

 so that the hatches were battened down, and in this 

 manner were part of the horses suffocated. Of 

 those which survived, amounting to twenty-two, 

 scarcely one escaped the glanders : but, notwith- 

 standing, we may conclude that they infected and 

 re-infected each other at the same moment and 

 under precisely the same circumstances as to heat, 

 respiration, and privations, yet the symptoms varied 

 greatly, and some few recovered so readily as to 

 leave great doubt whether they really had received 

 the glanders or not, whilst others exhibited real 

 glanders in the highest degree of virulence, and 

 were destroyed. Between these extremes, we are 

 informed, the remainder were variously affected : all 

 which circumstances prove incontestably how much 

 depended upon the previous health of each indivi- 

 dual, the vitiation of its blood and its co-fitness or 



