340 COMMUNICABILITY OF ASIATIC CHOLERA 
cholera then prevailing, a porcine dysenteric epizootic is also 
on record in Ireland. In this category we would, lastly, 
include the unusual mortality, with more or less striking 
choleraic symptoms, amongst cats, goats, and dogs, mentioned 
in the journals of the time as having been noted in Malaga, 
in 1834, and also in Algiers, Tunis, Cairo, and Constan- 
tinople, during the last epidemic visitation of the disease.* 
Now, in reference to the majority of the examples which 
we have thus collected together of local epizootic diseases, 
more or less coincident with and resembling cholera, it un- 
fortunately happens that neither the symptoms nor the post- 
mortem appearances have been made the subject of accurate 
medical investigation. Hence we at once reject them as 
positive evidences of the effects of a cholera agent upon the 
animals concerned. And in regard even to those instances in 
which we have had the advantage of more precise medical 
observation, both before and after death, — as in the case of 
the poultry by Mr. Searle, and MM. Carrere, Renault, and 
Delafond ; and in that of the pizootic described by Professor 
Dick, — instances which have been by some regarded as ex- 
amples of cholera in animals, — we more than hesitate, on a 
careful consideration of the symptoms and morbid anatomy, 
to admit their sufficient analogy with the human disease. 
The weight of both veterinarian and medical authority in- 
clines to this opinion, which is, moreover, strengthened, 
when we remember the liability of animals, and of the herbi- 
vora, in particular, to colics, diarrhoeas, and dysenteries, 
independently of the presence of cholera amongst men, — the 
tendency of the human mind to magnify the importance of 
merely coincident phenomena, — and lastly, the certainty, 
that if cholera had really reigned epizootically, as it has done 
epidemically, such powers over the animal kingdom would 
long ere this have been universally acknowledged. 
In conclusion, however, whilst we maintain that the occur- 
rence of epizootic cholera has not yet been satisfactorily 
demonstrated, we would draw attention to the circumstance, 
that as we narrow our field of observation — for example, 
from the animals of a continent or a country, to the cattle of 
a camp, the poultry of a village, or a compound, or the dogs 
of a populous city — we meet with a greater positiveness in 
the description, and a greater tendency on the part of those 
who observe and record, as well as of those who subsequently 
review the facts, to regard them as being more or less de- 
* See Indian, French, Russian, and Austrian Reports ; also M. Tardieu ; and 
the Medical Journals. 
