WEST OF ENGLAND VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 79 
will be renewed from time to time, until a low form of inflammation 
is set up, and the nutrient properties of the bone interfered with, 
as well as the secretions of synovia; this stage of the disease causes 
an aching pain, which interferes more or less with the action of the 
animal, depending on the degree of congestion. Now this state of 
things may exist for months, with but slight lameness, and that of 
an intermitting character. If the horse is now put under proper 
treatment, and allowed sufficient time for the vessels to recover their 
tone, the animal will be as sound as before it occurred ; but, on the 
other hand, if the horse is not properly treated, and this congested 
state allowed to exist for a long time, it will be apt to inflame under 
the influence of some trivial exciting cause, and quickly to run into 
the degenerative state : this usually commences in the centre of the 
bone, where the nutrient action is lowest ; as long as the inflam- 
mation is kept up, the destructive action will continue. The more 
the vitality of a tissue is reduced, the less appears to be the degree 
of inflammation required to produce disintegration and ulceration of 
it ; indeed, if the vitality of a part be sufficiently lowered, it may 
fall into a state of ulceration with so slight a degree of inflammation 
as scarcely to be appreciable, the ulcerative action arising from dis- 
integration depending upon a want of nutrition, the first stages of 
which are softening and enlarging of the cancellated structure, the 
cells break up, absorption takes place, producing the first stage of 
molecular death, or what is termed dry caries; in some cases, this 
process goes on until a considerable portion of the internal struc- 
ture of the bone is destroyed without producing any granular dege- 
neration of the articular surface of the cartilage ; in this stage the 
congested state of the vessels are generally plainly to be seen, by 
the naked eye, through the cartilage. The bone, when in this 
inflamed state, is capable of affecting the tendon from contact, 
producing a gelatinous degeneration of the fibres, or a kind of dry 
ulceration, which has hitherto been mistaken for laceration, the 
result of sprain and friction. I find that when the disease has 
been communicated to the tendon by the inflamed bone, it may pro- 
gress in the tendon, and the bone recover its healthy structure ; or 
if the bone has been much diseased (articulatory surface excepted), 
it may be completely repaired, at the same time that the disease is 
progressing in the tendon, but these cases are rare and exceptional. 
I have two or three specimens. I am also of an opinion, that 
nature is capable of repairing the tendon when not extensively 
diseased, seeing how quickly injured tendons in other parts of the 
leg are repaired. 
In my investigation I have not found a case where the commence- 
ment of the disease was not clearly traceable to the bone. At one 
time I thought that it did occasionally commence in the tendon 
from compression, the result of excessive work perverting the 
nutritive properties of the tendon at that particular part. 
In some cases the perverted nutrition of the bone produces gra- 
nular degeneration, first of the natural cartilage cells which are 
imbedded in the hyaline matrix, and secondly of the hyaline matrix 
