86 
MAMMALIA. 
unfortunately without comment, in his most admirable and valuable 
monograph of our Fur-bearing Animals (pp. 223-235). 
“ Dr. Janeway states that the disease ‘ is evidently epidemical, no 
cases of it having been reported previous to 1870 in this region,’ 
which is unquestionably the fact. 
“ Now it strikes me that there is a good deal of first-class ‘ poppy- 
cock ’ in the Rev. Mr. Hovey’s article, and in most of the contribu- 
tions that have appeared since 
“ Let us take a rational view of the case, and ojance, for a mo- 
ment, at the history ol an average outbreak of hydrophobia. Here 
is a rabid dog. Before succumbing to the disease, or to the hand of 
man, he has probably bitten at least one or two other dogs or cats, 
which in their turn bite others, and so on, till the community be- 
comes aroused; and scarcely enough of these animals are left to pro- 
pagate their kind. 
“ Now, suppose a ‘mad dog’ should, in his wild delirium, chance 
to run across and bite a Skunk, and in a region where Skunks hap- 
pened to abound, would not the natural result be that this Skunk 
would bite others and so communicate the disease to them, and they 
to others still, and so on till most of the Skunks of that neighbor- 
hood had been infected ? During a certain stage of the disease, 
should any of these hydrophobic Skunks, by any accident fall in 
with a man sleeping on the ground, that man would certainly be very 
liable to be bitten, and if bitten, to die of this terrible malady. Ex- 
actly such a state of things, apparently, came to the notice of Mr. 
Hovey, who published the facts in the American Journal of Science 
and Arts , as above stated. But instead of confining his remarks to 
a simple, truthful narration of facts, he indulges in the wildest spec- 
ulations and empty theories concerning the fatal nature of Skunk 
bites in the abstract. 
“ To suggest, as does the Rev. Hovey, that the bite of a healthy 
Skunk is followed by hydrophobia is, to speak mildly, the height of 
irrational nonsense. Equally insane is his idea that Skunks, in the 
