4o6 Veterinary Medicine. 



Distribution. It is a denizen of the tropics, and not confined 

 to W. Africa and Arabia as its popular names would imply, but is 

 well-known in Upper Senegal, Senaar, Darfur, Kardofan, Abys- 

 sinia, Nubia, Egypt, Arabia generally, Hindustan and China. 

 To the New World it is alleged to have been carried by negro 

 slaves, and is now domiciled in Guiana, Curacao, Brazil and 

 Buenos Ayres. 



The female Filaria Medinensis is a thin white worm of great . 

 length, 1 8 inches to 2 feet, (in exceptional cases 12 feet), and .5 

 to 1.7 mm. thick. The head is rounded, and covered by an 

 irregular shield, elongated, transversely, and perforated in the 

 middle by the triangular mouth furnished with two papillae, one 

 above and one below, and behind the latter, six others. The tail 

 ends in a short blunt point, curved into a hook on the ventral as- 

 pect. The digestive canal, well developed in the young, becomes 

 atrophied in the mature worm, especially behind where it no 

 longer reaches the anus. The oviduct is very large and gorged 

 with eggs and embryos, but it is no longer connected with an ex- 

 ternal opening, and the young can escape only by the rupture of 

 the body of the parent. The embryos are of uniform thickness 

 in the anterior Yi ds., but taper to a fine point in the posterior 

 third. They are .5 to .75 mm. long by 15 /* to 25 /a thick. The 

 male worm is not found in the subcutaneous tissues. 



Life History. Fedchenko has traced the embryos into the 

 body of Cyclops, a fresh water crustacean, as many as 12 infesting 

 a single host without seeming to materially incommode it. Taken 

 in with the unboiled or unfiltered water, the cyclops is destroyed 

 and digested in the stomach of man, horse or dog, and the larval 

 filaria set at liberty. 



As the ovigerous female only is found in the tissues, itis sur- 

 mised that the male and female grow to maturity and copulate in 

 the bowels of the mammalian host, that the male then perishes 

 and is expelled in the faeces, and that the impregnated female 

 bores its way into the tissues, but that it is only after 8 months to 

 2 years that it makes its appearance in and under the skin. 

 (Neumann). Fedchenko, however, failed to convey the disease 

 by feeding young dogs and a cat with infested cyclops. 



Dracontiasis in the dog. This has been seen in India, 

 (Smyttan, Forbes, Griffiths), Egypt (Clot-Bey, Pruner-Bey, 



