REVIEW. 
331 
an accompaniment or sequel of distemper. But the considera- 
tion of a point of so much importance as this we must defer to 
another and fitter occasion. 
In reference to M/ Charlier’s paper, the report of which, as 
drawn up by the committee appointed by the central society, 
we have now concluded, we are decidedly of opinion, that many 
practical advantages are derivable from the consideration of 
those disorders to which young horses, when they come first to 
be stabled, are especially obnoxious, as one general disease, to 
which the French have appended the name of gourme, and for 
which we can in our vernacular vocabulary find no better appel- 
lation than distemper ; the old notion in regard to which is, that 
the animal has accumulated, from some causes or other, within 
his system, a quantity of peccant humours, and that it is quite 
impossible for him to thrive or do well until he has cast these 
humours off; the ordinary way in which this is effected being, 
as we know, through the emunctories of the membrane lining 
the air-passages. Supposing it to be founded in fact, that cer- 
tain matters do accumulate and become hurtful or redundant in 
the animal economy, and that therefrom, for the well-doing of 
the animal, it is necessary they should be got rid of, the reason 
why the membrane lining the nose and windpipe and bronchial 
tubes should be, by nature, so commonly selected as the 
emunctory, appears to have no other foundation than the simple 
circumstance of its being, in the first place, a convenient 
channel for emission; and, in the second, from its being so 
subject to have irritation and inflammation set up in it; during 
the augmented secretion attendant on which it is that we sup- 
pose the “ bad humours” to be discharged. And once over 
this, we regard the young subject as “ having had the dis- 
temper,” or, in the French expression, as havingye/^ sa gourme , 
and on such account to be more desirable or valuable to his 
possessor : distemper being so far from being unattended with 
danger, that in certain forms and sites we know it frequently 
amounts to a highly dangerous disease. 
From the fact of all the three and four and even five year 
old horses, with very few exceptions, who come out of the 
