642 
GLANDERS. 
Fourthly : that where such fomites of infection had been destroyed, 
places, before to the utmost degree unhealthy, had been rendered 
perfectly salubrious by the introduction of proper ventilation. 
Let us examine these alleged facts, together with the ingenious 
and plausible arguments our late Professor founded upon them. 
Coleman’s talents were of an order that gifted him with a ready 
and acute perception of things in general, enabling him often to 
discover cause and design where, to those around, all seemed 
buried in mystery. This penetrative and fertile genius of his, how- 
ever, would at times lead him beyond the limits of fair and legiti- 
mate deduction into regions of theorization where his best friends 
felt loath to accompany him : he had at the offset, perhaps, framed 
a pretty and truth-looking theory ; but too often would he mar the 
fair image he had created by loading it with more accountability 
than it was able to sustain. Thus it was with the point of hippo- 
pathology now before us. He succeeded in proving to the minds 
of most, if not of all veterinarians of his time, that the poison or 
miasm of the stable was a fruitful source of glanders and farcy, and 
that it was especially operative when those diseases broke out on 
a sudden, or in an epidemic form; but he refused to admit the 
influence of contagion in any case save where actual contact and 
abrasion, tantamount altogether to inoculation, could be proved to 
have taken place. In every other instance of alleged contagion 
brought before him he could discover some want of ventilation, 
some source of “poison and to such an extent did he carry the 
omnipresence of this suppositious poison that I have heard him 
say that horses at pasture even might, by sniffing over parcels of 
dung or places wetted by urine, in the open fields inhale it in as 
efficacious a form as though they had inspired it generated in 
their stables. Consistently with which notions, so far did he carry 
his plans of ventilation that he thought open sheds in straw-yards 
should have apertures for the admission of pure and the emission 
of impure air, the same as stables themselves. And yet, non-con- 
tagionist as Coleman was in his opinions, the regulations issued 
from time to time at his suggestion for the guidance of the veteri- 
nary surgeons of the army were, in their nature, as effectually cal- 
culated to prevent the spread of the disease by contagion as any 
one of an opposite way of thinking could possibly desire, as will 
appear by the subjoined extract from them, received by me in the 
month of October, 1837 : — 
Extract of a Report from the Principal Veterinary Surgeon. 
11 I have always considered it the duty of all commanding officers and 
veterinary surgeons of cavalry regiments to report to the respective barrack- 
masters any and every stall occupied by a glandered horse, and requiring paint- 
ing, &c. ; and, it is my opinion, that not only those stalls or standings occupied 
