398 WATERY FARCY — EXTERNAL DROPSY, &C. 
ceptible of or predisposed to take it. I have known horses to 
have the disease twice, and three times — to be, in fact, peculiarly 
obnoxious to it; and at the spring of the year the best means 
of warding off an attack is known to the grooms to be a dose of 
physic or two, or blood-letting, or a change from hard to soft 
laxative diet — from hay to green meat, & c. A horse that came 
to me with an attack of the disease in one hind leg, I thought at 
the time owed its commencement to a crack in the heel of the dis- 
eased limb ; and I still think this might have tended to its pro- 
duction, though, no doubt, he had the predisposition lurking in 
his constitution. 
Mostly, one of the hind limbs becomes the seat of the disease : 
now and then, however, it will attack one — or it may be both — 
fore limbs : the body also not infrequently participates in being 
its seat, the tumefactions about it for the most part subsiding into 
one general swelling underneath the abdomen. In one instance I 
saw the withers attacked with swelling. Next to the limbs, how- 
ever, the head is the part oftenest diseased, in particular the nose : 
both nostrils, on some occasions, swelling to that degree to cause 
alarm ; it is oftener, however, confined to one. 
At the onset the swelling, in whatever part it may appear, is 
not commonly a general tumefaction. We do not so often, I think, 
find the entire limb enlarged as we discover a tumour or tumours 
upon it. If it is a hind limb, the tumour is commonly seated upon 
the inside of the thick of the thigh ; if a fore one, upon the inner 
surface of the arm. 1 have, however, seen them upon the outer 
sides of the limbs — -upon the quarters, and, afterwards, running 
along the outside of the thigh to the hock. At first, I say, 
the swelling is partial or patchy ; by and by, however, as the dis- 
ease progresses, spreading by degrees, it becomes general, in- 
volving the whole limb, though continuing, so long as the disorder 
maintains its virulence, more upward than downward. The tumid 
parts for the first few days of their formation, or so long as the 
disease maintains its virulence, have a hot and tense feeling, and 
evince tenderness on pressure. As the swellings become spread 
abroad, however, and the inflammatory action abates, they prove 
less firm, sensitive to pressure, and, at length, acquire compara- 
tively a soft feel, and after a time become what may be called 
doughy , and palpably pit under the pressure of the finger. This, 
if it be combined with dropping of the swelling down into the 
most dependent parts, may be accounted a highly favourable 
change. When, however, the tumour, instead of spreading or 
diffusing itself, continues in the same place, circumscribed, de- 
fined, and from day to day increasing in prominence and painful- 
ness, we may expect it to come, in the end, to a more or less per- 
fect state of abscess, and to this termination it should (failing in 
