“114 BOARD OF 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 itis no won- 
der that many violent symptoms and high fever result, or that 
there should 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 Trichine 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,ete., 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 ina line, 
would amount to more than 120 miles. 
: Digitized by Microsoft® 
