TO DOMESTICATED ANIMALS. 405 
worn the linen of the dead (Jenisch and others), all with per- 
fect impunity. 
It is remarked by Schmidt, that he worked for hours in a 
warm atmosphere charged with the vapours from cholera- 
blood and discharges, whilst engaged in analysing these 
fluids, and yet without any inconvenience. Other experi- 
menters must have had the same experience. Schmidt 
placed a cat in a ventilated box, having a false perforated 
bottom, under which he put 1 litre (1J pint) of cholera 
dejections, and SO grammes (about 1 ounce) of cholera-blood 
from a patient yet living, SO hours after his seizure. No bad 
symptoms arose in the cat, during a 48 hours 5 confinement. 
Two subsequent trials with another cat, one of four days 5 , 
the other of three days 5 duration, gave similar negative 
results. Just before the disappearance of the epidemic from 
London, we ourselves confined tw 7 o rabbits in close hutches, 
with pans containing cholera dejections. The animals suf- 
fered in no apparent way. 
The absence of effect in all the preceding cases, both in 
men and animals, suffices to show, that exhalations in small 
quantities from the breath, the skin, the blood, or the evacu- 
ations, are not deleterious; and that, in larger quantities, 
injurious effects, if possible, may be counteracted by non- 
susceptibility. So far as animals are concerned, further 
experiments are necessary/ 
There is little doubt, that if ever , under circumstances of 
great concentration or otherwise, cholera be extended by 
contagion, it is probably sometimes communicated by ema- 
nations of some kind or other passing through the air, and 
acting on the gastro-pulmonary mucous membrane, reputed 
examples of which being very abundant, need not be quoted 
here. One set of facts should not, how T ever, be altogether 
neglected — viz. those relating to the supposed infectious 
character of the clothes of cholera patients, probably soiled 
with the evacuations and vomits, charged with exhalations 
from the skin and lungs, and left to dry or to be packed-up 
without having been washed. We will not do more than 
allude to the many instances in which, during the progress 
of the disease across the waters of the Black Sea, the Baltic, 
the German Ocean, the Channel, the Mediterranean, or the 
Atlantic, cholera has been supposed to have been conveyed 
by means of the dried, packed-up, unwashed bedding or 
clothes of those who have died on board ship of the disease. 
These general statements, though confessedly resting, for the 
most part, on unscientific testimony, and generally explicable 
by reference to a prevailing epidemic influence, are suffi- 
