542 
EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
and contests to which vaccination has given, and continues 
to give, rise, as a preventive or modifier of smallpox, our 
surprise subsides into disappointment that human judgment 
and decision should be so erring and wavering, while facts 
themselves, cateris paribus , remain unaltered. In the case 
before us, so far from there being any likelihood of the ques- 
tion being ce finally and satisfactorily set at rest,” we are 
informed by Professor Simonds (who, it will be remembered, 
is commissioned by the Royal Agricultural Society to draw 
up a Report on the subject of Pleuro-pneumonia, and whose 
second paper was published by us last month,) that “ the sub- 
ject seems destined, for a time at least, to hold its place 
among the quastiones vexatce .” 
When a disease becomes epidemic at certain times or 
seasons of the year, or sporadic in certain localities, it can 
hardly fail to assume, at one period or another, features by 
which it may seem to be, and be called, contagious or infec- 
tious, though, in point of real fact, it may happen to be 
neither. Thus, strangles, for instance, in horses, by many 
persons, some professional, is regarded as being contagious; 
and yet, for our own part, we never thought, or had sufficient 
reason to think so. Influenza or distemper in horses is 
looked upon by some in the same suspicious light, while 
others declare the disease to be purely epidemic, and spread- 
ing solely through atmospheric influences. But no fact of 
this description appears to us more suspicious than the one, 
that glanders, of whose infection everybody now is afraid, 
and which every surgeon no longer hesitates to admit into 
his own catalogue of diseases, should, in the time of Coleman, 
have been denied to be harbourable by the human frame, 
and by him asserted most strongly to be a disease peculiar 
and confined to the chevaline race. Time — the arbiter as 
well as consumer of all things — in the end settles all these 
disputed points ; though, in some cases, it takes long, very 
long, before the settlement comes to hand. It may turn 
out so in the case we are now considering. 
Nobody acquainted with Professor Simonds will withhold 
from him the credit of having used his best endeavours in this 
arduous investigation to bring the important question before 
