MIDLAND COUNTIES VETERINARY MEDICAL ASSOCIATION. 777 
secondary, is dependent on the accumulation of the force we call 
heat, and that the whole of the phenomena we observe up to death 
itself are due simply and solely to the inability of the body, from 
some accident or other, to dispose of that active force which the 
body in perfect health sets free for the mere purpose and intent of 
ministering to the production of those processes which are summed 
up in the term life.” 
Treatment. 
I feel that I shall be expected to say something on this part of 
our subject, but I assure you, gentlemen, it is that part upon which 
I enter with the greatest diffidence. From all the accounts of the 
medical treatment hitherto adopted in this disease, such treatment 
seems to have had very variable results, and to have been of very 
questionable benefit. But when we take into consideration the con- 
clusions of various individual and collective or commissional investi- 
gations on this subject, we find they all agree in the main, that a 
certain percentage of animals will have the disease and die, let your 
measures be ever so judicious; that another percentage will have 
the disease more or less severe and recover completely or partially ; 
while a third percentage will have the disease so mildly or not at 
all as to be unobserved, and my experience teaches me that the per- 
centage may be apportioned equally in thirds ; or when we view the 
disease as propagated by contagion having its periods of incubation, 
manifestation, and termination, or rather incrementation and ex- 
crementation with a specific immovable cause, we should soon see 
that, like allied specific affections in the human subject, any thera- 
peutical interference would not prevent, but only mitigate, the 
various symptoms to be developed in each successive stage of the 
malady; and our treatment therefore, until we have ascertained the 
nature and properties of the virus, and how to seize upon and 
neutralise the poison, must always be considered mitigatory, not 
curative, in character. 
Every attempt to prove the existence in contagious pleuro-pneu- 
monia lymph of a particular corpuscle or a specific product appre- 
ciable by anatomical and microscopical characters, have hitherto 
failed, so must all experiments to test the efficacy of inoculation 
until we are able to say definitely in what excretion, secretion, or 
substance of a diseased animal’s body lies the power to communicate 
this disease to others ; for if the fluid exuded in any part of the 
thoracic cavity, or the consolidated diseased tissues themselves be 
introduced into the system of the healthy, notwithstanding any 
amount of constitutional irritation, or even death itself as a conse- 
quence, we fail in every case to produce hepatization of lung tissue, 
the most striking and invariable characteristic of the disease where 
received through cohabitation, or to produce a disease however 
mild in the least degree resembling contagious pleuro-pneumonia. 
Experimenting inoculators should therefore look to some 
excreted educt given off from the system of an animal recovering 
from the malady, rather than to the passive products of the disease 
