774 MIDLAND COUNTIES VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 
If the vital energies are not too much exhausted, or the organic 
alterations and obstructions too great, dame nature sets about a 
restoration, if otherwise, vitality sinks into death ; molecular inertia 
prevails. In either case we have a gradual decrease of temperature, 
not however so rapid for returning health, as for death. 
It is in cases of recovery, as soon as the vital energies are some- 
what restored, that nature begins to relieve herself of the products 
of the disease by the process of excretion, which I believe is going 
on more or less for three months. This, then, in my opinion is the 
period of danger, the period of excrementation, the period of infec- 
tion, the period par excellence of contamination. 
It would be incorrect to state that the ravages in the lungs after 
a severe attack of contagious pleuro-pneumonia are never restored, 
for I have known extensive lobular hepatization, and interlobular 
and thoracic infiltration removed, and the lung restored to useful- 
ness, but I do not believe that attached pleurae are ever divorced ; 
thus it is an ever-remaining sign of what has been. 
Nevertheless, how many animals after coughing up decayed pieces 
of lung tissue or fibrinous castings of bronchial tubes, in three or 
four months succumb with abscesses in the lung, enclosing masses 
of decayed tissue and degenerated fibrinous deposits, having only 
rallied for a period to disseminate amongst their companions the 
virulent malady to which they at last become victims. 
Physio-Pathology . 
In the course of my remarks I have limited my opinions of the 
pathology of contagious epizootic pleuro-pneumonia. Differing from 
all writers that I have read and all lecturers that I have heard, 1 
entirely discard the notion that it is a dropsical disease in the 
primary sense of that word, but I concede that after the malignant 
fever has run its course, checked all the animal excretions and secre- 
tions, and thus thrown back on the circulating media an increased 
quantity and impure quality of serosity, nature attempts to relieve 
herself by thoracic and interlobular effusion, which may be called 
dropsical. So may every effusion when it is the result of inflamma- 
tion. I believe contagious pleuro-pneumonia to be a malignant 
specific sub-acute inflammation of the lungs and pleurae, preceded 
and accompanied by a systematic inflammatory fever, and I account 
for the appearances in the thorax after death in the following 
manner. 
As every orb of the planetary world of our universe rotates round 
its own axis, as well as duly moving in its allotted sphere, so can I 
see in healthy blood each globule gyrating around its own centre as 
it circulates through our veins, while duly performing its important 
but minute functions for the wellbeing of our animal economy. So 
also does it occur that when the fluid media in which those blood- 
globules live, move, and develop, become by induced or determinate 
causes and undevelopable media, or blastema to them, that I can 
understand their tendency to run together, to coalesce, from the 
