266 PROSE HAilEUTICS. 



and to the small-pox beneath, the scales ; to worms, and 

 internal ulcerations of the liver ;* to visceral obstruction 

 from feeding too freely on chickweedj to malignant 

 pustules, and sympathetic carbuncles ;t to a morbus 

 pedicularis j to a slimy exudation from the eyes ending 

 in blindness ; and, according to Monsieur Comte Achard, 

 ' a une fievre epidemique, contagieuse, inflammatoire, pu- 

 tride et gangreneuse' ! 



The carp, though a poor fish to diue on au naturel, 



* Aristotle asserts that fish enjoy imimiQity from disease. 

 Pliny modifies Aristotle's assertion, which he maintains must be 

 confined to epidemic afiections alone. ' We do not know or read 

 that all sortes be subject to maladies or diseases as other beasts, 

 and even the wilde and savage ; but that this or that fishe in 

 every kind may be, it appeareth evidently in that some of them 

 mislike, and come to be carrion-lean, whiles other of the like sorte 

 are in good pUght and exceeding fat.' Sophocles tells a difierent 

 story — i<l)rJKev iWois IxOvaiv bia^Bopav ; and Virgil says. 

 Jam maris immensi prolem, et genus omne natantum, 

 Littore in extremo, oeu naufraga corpora fluctus, 

 Proluit : 

 and theirverse is more in accordance with fact thanAristotle'sprose. 

 Epidemics amongst fish are not rare ; a very remarkable one 

 occurred some twenty years ago. ' During the prevalence of the 

 first visitation of Asiatic cholera on the continent, fish perished 

 in vast numbers, particularly in Marienburg, a district in 

 Prussia, where forty tons of them were buried from a single pond 

 in Dimpenburg.^ To quote but one other case ; Cetti, after a 

 five days' Xoijxhs, lost, in his ponds, upwards of a hundred carp, 

 and almost as many eels ; the pike and tench were scarcely 

 affected : this disease occurred in winter, and only in such of the 

 stews as had foul bottoms : it was no doubt occasioned, as he 

 supposes, by the extrication of sulphuretted hydrogen kept from 

 escaping by a thick sheet of ice covering the surface. Broussonet 

 found that putting carbonate of soda into the water, even in very 

 small quantities, was equally deleterious to carp, 

 t Daudibert, Nosologie des Poissons. 



'Lancet,' History of Cholera, Nov. 1831. 



