36 MAMMALIA. 



unfortunately without comment, in his most cidmirable and valuable 

 monograph of our r\ir-bearing- Animals (pp. 223-235). 



" Dr. Janeway states that the disease ' is evidendy epidemical, no 

 cases of it having been reported previous to 1870 in this region,' 

 which is unquestionably the fact. 



" Now it strikes me that there is a good deal of first-class ' poppy- 

 cock ' in the Rev. Mr. Hovey's article, and in most of the contribu- 

 tions that have appeared since 



" Let us take a rational view of the case, and glance, for a mo- 

 ment, at the history of an average outbreak of hydrophobia. Here 

 is a rabid dog. Before succumbing to the disease, or to the hand of 

 man, he has probably bitten at least one or two other dogs or cats, 

 which in their turn bite others, and so on, till the community be- 

 comes aroused; and scarcely enough of these animals are left to pro- 

 pagate their kind. 



" Now, suppose a 'mad dog' should, in his wild delirium, chance 

 to run across and bite a Skunk, and in a region where Skunks hap- 

 pened to abound, would not the natural result be that this Skunk 

 would bite others and so communicate the disease to them, and they 

 to others still, and so on till most of the Skunks of that neighbor- 

 hood had been infected .^ During a certain .stage of the di.sease, 

 should any of these hydrophobic Skunks, by any accident fall in 

 with a man sleeping on the ground, that man would certainly be very 

 liable to be bitten, and if bitten, to die of this terrible malady. Ex- 

 actly such a state of things, apparently, came to the notice of Mr. 

 Hovey, who published the facts in the American Journal of Science 

 and Arts, as above stated. But instead of confining his remarks to 

 a simple, truthful narration of facts, he indulges in the wildest spec- 

 ulations and empty theories concerning the fatal nature of Skunk 

 bites in the abstract. 



" To suggest, as does the Rev. Hovey, that the bite of a healthy 

 Skunk is followed by hydrophobia is, to speak mildly, the height of 

 irrational nonsense. Equally insane is his idea that Skunks, in the 



