ON THE DISTEMPER AMONG CATTLE. 647 
were all four of the same nature, or that the diseases themselves 
differed — no more than farcy and glanders differ — only in being 
seated in different parts or tissues ; therefore, when Coleman as- 
serted that the same poison that produced glanders would produce 
ophthalmia, grease, and rabies, it is manifest he could have re- 
garded the poison but in the light of a common though malignant 
infector. 
There is no absolute need to suppose that the infection or 
miasm generated in the atmosphere of the stable, and believed to be 
the producer of glanders and farcy, is the same as the contagious 
virus of glanders itself : it may be a sort of malaria , the result of 
the decomposition of animo-vegetable matter, or else of a com- 
pound of mephitic vapours positively injurious of themselves to 
the mucous membrane of the nose and air-passages, independently 
of any exclusion or diminution of the oxygen of the confined air. 
And as a poisonous agent, it may either prove at once noxious to 
this membrane itself, or, through its medium, become absorbed and 
carried into the circulation, contaminating the blood, and breaking 
out in the form of farcy in some horses, in that of glanders in 
others ; and capable — the same as malaria is thought capable of 
producing fever in some persons, cholera in others — of producing, 
according to Coleman, ophthalmia and grease as well, and even, 
in the dog, rabies. Whatever plausible reasons there may be, 
however, for believing that what will produce glanders and farcy, 
the same may create ophthalmia and grease, there do not appear 
to be any examples of the spontaneous origin of rabies ; the only 
argument in support of such a presumption being the hackneyed 
question of, how the first case of rabies came to appear. 
ON THE DISTEMPER AMONG CATTLE. 
By Mr. JOHN Relph, Sebergham. 
It is well known that horses and cattle are liable to premature 
death from inflammation of the various tissues, and many other 
forms of disease to which domestication, the seasons, and heredi- 
tary predisposition subject them. During the prevalence of easterly 
winds in the spring inflammatory affections of the respiratory or- 
gans often abound, and so do those of the brain and liver in a hot 
summer. These agents render the animal more susceptible to cer- 
tain diseases, and this predisposition frequently modifies the dis- 
