114 . ' BOARD OP AGRICULTURE. 



ous symptoms, but the majority finally reach and remain in 

 the voluntary muscles, where they live and thrive for some 

 weeks, making for themselves passages, and even entering and 

 destroying the fibres themselves. All these operations cause, 

 of course, an immense amount of inflammation and irritation, 

 if, as often happens, millions of these flesh-worms are at work 

 at the same time in all parts of the system ; and it is no won- 

 der that many violerit symptoms and high fever result, or that 

 there sh.ould be intense soreness and pain or paralysis of the 

 muscles, and dropsical swellings. Death in severe cases may 

 occur at any time from the fifth to the fiftieth day. The du- 

 ration of the disease, like its severity, is in direct proportion to 

 the number of living Trichinge swallowed, and varies from two 

 weeks to three or four months. Even in many comparatively 

 mild cases, the suffering is intense and the recovery slow and 

 tedious, while many secondary diseases, like pneumonia,etc. , are 

 liable to ensue. When all the worms have become lodged in 

 the muscles and enclosed in cysts, the direct symptoms cease, 

 and, if the strength of the patient has been kept up, recovery 

 is probable. Some persons, especially females, are much more 

 severely affected than others, by the same number of the para- 

 sites. 



Persons in robust health may be able to survive the attack 

 of half a million or more of these flesh-worms and recover, 

 but there is a limit to all human endurance, and the numbers 

 often contained in the muscles of animals or persons who 

 have been killed by them, are almost incredible. In a cat fed 

 with trichinous flesh by Leuckart, they were so numerous that 

 he estimated that one ounce of the flesh contained at least 

 325,000 worms. Microscopic preparations, not much larger 

 than a pin's head, often contain from ten to forty worms, and 

 one bit of muscle, weighing about one-fifth of a grain, from a 

 child that died on the seventy-ninth day, contained fifty- 

 eight. Allowing only one hundred worms to a grain of mus- 

 cle, a man weighing 150 pounds might contain over forty 

 millions of the parasites, and the length of the muscular 

 fibres actively inflamed by such a number, if placed in a line, 

 would amount to more than 120 miles. 



