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ON SPECIFIC GRAVITIES. 
for if it did we should have grooms and stable-boys contracting 
the disease from living and sleeping in confined stables. 
Mr. Travers saw plainly that the poison of glanders was capable 
of becoming absorbed by human lymphatics, but refused to call 
the “ irritation” thus produced by the name of glanders or farcy. 
On the other hand, Mr. Vines throws the notion of “ poison” 
or “ specific” altogether out of the question, affirming that “ all the 
symptoms of disease which constitute glanders and farcy invariably 
depend upon the unhealthy state of the system .” Now, knowing 
as we do, that our own system, as well as that of the horse, is 
capable of exhibiting glanders and farcy, why, under certain cir- 
cumstances of unhealthiness, should it not, on occasions, breed 
glanders or farcy as well as the horse’s system 1 Or, how comes 
it that horses, whose systems are not very unfrequently in an 
“ unhealthy state,” have glanders and farcy so very rarely ] That 
animal bodies, under circumstances of disordered health or debi- 
lity, are more prone to take disease than at another time, we have 
every reason to believe ; but that without the actual presence of 
the poison , or something tantamount thereto, or without some 
specific predisposition, they can under such circumstances take 
specific disease, I cannot bring myself to believe. 
There is nothing to shew that glanders and farcy pathologically 
differ when seated in the human frame from the disease we call 
by that name in horses : they present the same phenomena, run 
similar courses, and prove equally as incurable, or are as rarely 
cured, in one as in the other. Glanders has been said on some rare 
occasions to be “ cured” in man as well as in horses ; farcy has not 
so very infrequently been “ cured” or mitigated, or arrested in its 
course, in one as well as in the other. No more in human than in 
veterinary medicine, however, is there known any certain remedy 
or antidote for either form of disease. Long has such a desideratum 
been lacked by veterinary surgeons : possibly, our better informed 
medical brethren may, before many years more have passed, be 
able to help us to a mode of cure. 
ON SPECIFIC GRAVITIES. 
By James Anderson, MR C.V.S. and M.N.A.M.S.M., %c. tyc. 
Leicester. 
By the term specific gravity, applied to any substance, is meant 
the relation which its weight bears to the weight of an equal bulk 
of some other substance, taken as the standard of unity. The 
standard of unity is pure water at the temperature of 60° Fahr., 
