SPLENIC DISEASE. 
323 
influence exerted in the production of such by the geological 
properties of a district, such as nature of the soil, indigenous 
vegetation, exposure, water, air, and elevation, have hitherto 
scarcely been taken into account. It is to be hoped, how- 
ever, now that the “ Brown bequest” negotiations are prac- 
tically completed, that the Committee will soon be in 
working order, and he enabled to render good service in this 
direction, and that we may fairly expect to confer, not only 
immediate and material benefits on the great agricultural in- 
terests of the country by the elucidation of the causes and 
relations of epizootic diseases, but probably greater, if more 
remote advantages in the research after the intimate causes 
and origin of disease, in animals in which they can be most 
advantageously studied by methods calculated to shed light 
on the mysteries of disease in man. 
Foremost among the enzootic diseases stands splenic 
apoplexy, so called — a disease not known some ten or twelve 
years ago, and generally regarded as the result of overfeeding, 
plethora, or some occult influences operating in certain con- 
ditions of system, induced by food or drink of certain kinds 
or spurious quality ; while others consider it to be of the 
zymotic class, depending on a blood-poison, anthrax, of the 
miasmatic order , but not contagious. It is much easier, how- 
ever, to say what it is not than what it is. 
A number of cases occurring in this district, under circum- 
stances not usually considered favorable to its development, 
induces me to trouble you with a few particulars, with a view 
of furnishing, perhaps, some assistance towards a solution of 
its nature, cause, or prevention, or as a stimulus to further 
inquiry. 
The principal sufferer was a tenant farmer, occupying 
about 700 acres of fen land, in two farms of about 350 each, 
about one mile apart, stretching north and south from the 
main drain that runs east to Spalding, to the road leading 
from that place to Market Deeping. The soil is a black, 
spongy peat, containing roots and trunks of trees, consisting 
principally of vegetable carbonaceous matter, unless where it 
has undergone the operation of claying. It is the debris of 
some primeval forest, and its surrounding vegetation, bog- 
plants and mosses, which had then flourished on the surface 
of the clay, a subsidence of the surface being the only ex- 
planation of this catastrophe. The surface is at present 
lower than the sea, the level varying from fourteen to sixteen 
feet below high-water mark in the German Ocean. Subsoil, 
clay or silt; geological formation, the great oolite, in the 
middle oolite, the underlying substratum being the Oxford 
