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ANALYSIS OF CONTINENTAL JOURNALS. 
SUBACUTE ENCEPHALITIS. 
By this designation Gemeinder describes an equine disease 
which, for a dozen years, has made ravages in Bavaria. It 
more especially attacks horses in good condition, of good 
constitution, and at the most vigorous period of life. The 
exciting causes are unknown, but there is no doubt that in- 
attention to hygiene, insufficient exercise during the winter, 
lodgment in hot, badly ventilated stables, too much clothing, 
and the administration of food too rich in quality and over- 
abundant in quantity, are all so many predisposing con- 
ditions. Horses submitted to the influence of these causes, 
says Gemeinder, shed their coats more rapidly than others, 
healthy, but when viewed more attentively there were noticed here and there 
small red points, due to fine arborisations of the vascular membrane of the 
sac, and corresponding to these, onlthe inner surface, were very small 
white masses, which, when examined microscopically, were discovered 
to be patches of “ mould ” commencing to extend. These vegetations were 
also noted even in the air-conduits of the bones. All the other organs were 
healthy. But before Heusinger, Emmert and Mayer (Meckel, Archiv fur 
Physiologie , vol. i, p. 310) had made a similar observation in the case of a 
tame jackdaw which, confined in a chamber, was affected in its respiration 
one day and died the following night. When opened next morning the 
bronchial mucous membrane was covered with fungi, the lungs were tuber- 
culous and hepatised, but all the other organs were healthy. Jager also 
dissected a swan that had just died, and found the air-sacs thickened, of a 
cartilaginous consistency, divided by septa, and their inner surface covered 
by “mould” (ibid., vol. ii, p. 354). Theile one morning received a raven 
which had been kept in a room, and which had died the previous evening. The 
lungs were partly hepatised, and in the bronchi and air-sacs were discovered 
some thin patches covered with fungi. (Zeitschrift fur die Organische Phy- 
sik , vol. i, p. 331.) Deslongchamps had under observation an Anas mollis- 
sima, which was ill for three weeks with symptoms of disturbed respiration. 
Immediately after death he dissected it, and found the bronchial mucous 
membrane in the lungs and the air-sacs thickly lined by fungoid patches, 
measuring from two or three millimetres to several centimetres in diameter. 
These patches rested on a material which M. Deslongchamps thought was 
an albuminous exudation, beneath which the membrane was injected. ( An - 
nales des Sciences Naturelles , vol. xv, p. 371.) Muller and Retzius have 
observed fungi in the air-sacs, and at the same time mycoid masses in the 
lungs of a Strix nyctea , which had died at Stockholm. (Muller, Archiv fur 
Anatomie und Physiologie , 1842, p. 198.) And Dr. Crisp somewhere men- 
tions, if I remember aright, the presence of vegetable fungi in the lungs of 
a calf he was examining. I regret I cannot at this moment lay my hands 
on the extracts I made from his description. Heusinger was of opinion that, 
in the case of birds (for he does not appear to have been aware of the ex- 
istence of fungi in the air-passages of other animals), there had previously 
been an exudative inflammation of the bronchi and air-sacs, and that the 
spores of the mycedinse inspired in respiration found therein all the influences 
favorable to their development. It may be added, that animals fed on plants 
infested by the rust spores of the parasitical TJredo Rubigo are frequently 
found to have these spores in a state of active growth in the air-cells of their 
lung's. — G. E. 
