INFLAMMATORY AFFECTIONS 307 
temperament.’ This, we believe, is credited to-day by some, 
and yet, quite 100 years before the date of the 1872 edition of 
Williams’s work—in 1756, to be exact—we find a veterinary 
writer when talking of grease (a disease, by-the-by, very 
closely allied to canker) exclaiming against this habit of 
referring everything which we do not rightly understand to 
some ill-humour of the body. The wisdom his words con- 
tain justifies us in giving them mention here. ‘It is a very 
foolish and absurd Notion,’ he says, ‘to imagine a Horse 
full of Humours when he happens to be troubled with the 
Grease. But such Shallow Reasoning will always abound 
while Peoples’ Judgments are always superficial. There- 
fore, to convince such unthinking Folks, let them take a 
thick Stick and beat a Horse soundly upon his Legs so that 
they bruise them in several Places, after which they will 
swell, I dare say, and yet be in no danger of Greasing. 
Now, pray, what were these offending Humours doing before 
the Bruises given by the Stick ?’ 
At the present day it is safe to assert that neither the 
ulcerative, the cancerous, nor the constitutional theory 
is believed in widely, and, among the mass of contrary 
opinions as to the cause of this disease, we may find that 
even quite early many of the older writers had discarded 
them. 
Quoting from Zundel, we may say that Dupuy in 1827 
considered canker as a hypertrophy of the fibres of the hoof, 
admitting at the same time that these fibres were softened 
by an altered secretion; while Mercier in 1841 stated that 
canker was nothing more than a chronic inflammation of 
the reticular tissue of the foot, characterized by diseased 
secretions of this apparatus. 
Saving that they make no mention of a likely specific 
cause, these last two statements express all that we believe 
to-day. As early as 1854, however, the existence of a 
specific cause was hinted at by Blaine in his ‘ Veterinary 
Art.’ We find him here describing canker as a fungoid 
excrescence, exuding a thin and offensive discharge, which 
inoculates the soft parts within its reach, particularly the 
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