EDITORIAL OBSERVATIONS. 
476 
season passes for influenza — occurs that baffles our best en- 
deavours to save it. Is this influenza, we ask, or is it not] If 
it be influenza, then all we can say about it, is, that it is no 
certain protection against an attack of the same disorder ; for 
that, even at the moment when the animal is convalescing in 
safety out of alarming pleuritic or pulmonic disease with which 
he has recently been assailed under the garb of influenza, he 
may fall amiss afresh, and now manifest most unequivocal 
symptoms of veritable influenza. And if the former pleuritic 
or pneumonic attack were not influenza, then ought our treat- 
ment to have admitted in such a case of variation from what we 
should otherwise have adopted. This is one point at the real 
truth of which we want to arrive, and in our opinion it is a 
highly important one. Connected with it is the fact, which to 
our mind has been satisfactorily established in practice, of the 
animal being able to undergo influenza a second if not a third 
time. And, as to whether the disease, in any form, be contagious 
or not, the question has so recently been discussed, in a French 
article on the subject translated into these pages, that there can 
be no call for us to open the argument anew here. 
Another phenomenon, not new, but still one of interest, is 
the two-fold form in which influenza among horses, according to 
age and condition of subject, season of year, &c. makes its ap- 
pearance. Soon after the turn of winter, or else in the spring of 
the year, depending upon the weather, the mucous lining of the 
air-passages, with special determination to the larynx, marks 
the seat of aliment ; while young horses — the three, four and 
raw five-year-olds, become its subjects. But, let the season ad- 
vance completely into summer, and hot settled weather set in, 
while north east winds become less frequent or cease altogether, 
and the influenza — though still preserving its name — presents 
itself in such an altered and questionable form, that, were it not 
that it is still called by the name, we should not recognize or 
acknowledge it as the same disease; and after all, though it 
unquestionably is epidemic, it raises a grave question in our 
mind, whether in nature it be related to the former disease or 
not. For now, in place of the mucous membrane of the air- 
passages being the chief or sole seat of disease, the conjunctive 
