REVIEW. 327 
economy finds vent, and the multiplicity of such abscesses has 
been known to prove the cause of exhaustion and death. 
So that distemper is not what the title of M. Charlier’s paper 
would lead us to believe it is, a local disease, a catarrhal in- 
flammation of the air-passages : rather, it is a general disease 
affecting the whole body, morbus totius substantial, of which 
inflammation of the air-passage is one manifestation, and indeed 
the most common one, but not the only one, as the examples we 
have adduced will sufficiently demonstrate. 
This (general) disease, what is it? Is it not possible, in this 
our day, to relinquish those too vague terms of crisis and diathesis, 
by which the ancients expressed such phenomena as were the 
most salient in such kind of diseases, and to give some more 
definitive meaning to those general formules of antique medi- 
cine in the which the truth appears to us implicitly shut up ? 
Perhaps! — But, before replying to this question, let us inquire 
under what influences distemper most commonly declares itself. 
Of all the causes to which the development of distemper is 
attributed, the most active, the most powerful, the most certain 
in its results, is emigration ; that emigration which causes the 
colt to pass, without transition, from a part of the country where 
he has been bred into a fresh part, wherein every influence is 
new to him. What is the modus operandi of this cause ? It is 
manifold and complex. 
Emigration to a great distance produces, in a given and very 
short time, the same effects as change of seasons, with the dif- 
ference, that it is not by the slow and almost imperceptible 
gradation which marks the passing from one season to another, 
and modifies the influences proper to each of them, but by 
brusque and instantaneous change. 
Now, the living organism enjoys, it is true, a wonderful 
aptitude of accommodating itself to the external world, and of 
establishing a sort of equilibrium between its own functions and 
the influences of the different physical agents which surround it. 
But it is only in a certain condition that this aptitude remains 
unimpaired, and that is, when the action of such agents is not 
forcibly and suddenly modified ; for then, taken by surprise, it 
becomes deprived of its power of resistance. 
Thus, to cite but one example among many, and one of the 
most striking, that remarkable faculty with which animals are 
endowed of incessantly generating heat, and preserving, in all 
situations, a temperature suitable to them — this faculty, we say, 
is not the same in all seasons. It is greater in winter and less in 
summer, so that the living body, not possessing the same power 
of tolerance of cold and heat during these two extreme seasons, a 
low temperature, very supportable in winter and compatible with 
