DISEASE IN CATTLE RESEMBLING RABIES. 
645 
were, and all died in from four to nine days. On the 11th of 
July, I undertook the treatment of the animals, and at that period 
twenty were dead, and eight more not expected to live. 
After carefully examining the whole herd, I had four pounds of 
blood taken from every full-grown beast, whether sick or well. I 
was induced to do this by the apparent vigour of the animals, the 
restlessness and wild looks of even those which seemed otherwise 
healthy, and the full pulse and tumultuous throbbing of the heart. 
I considered that the saying, post hoc ergo propter hoc was here 
admissible, since I had no authority to go by. On the other 
hand, I did not like to take any great quantity of blood, on 
account of the absence of any symptoms of inflammation or fever 
in the blood, the prevalence of nervous characteristics, and the 
great weakness to which the patients were reduced so early as the 
third day after the attack. As I was not without my suspicions 
that the coarse, acid, unwholesome pasturage in a wood to which 
the animals had been confined had no very little influence in pro- 
ducing this disease, I ordered them to be taken up from that 
place, and given plenty of mucilaginous, and at the same time 
acidulated, drinks. 
When I found the animals evidently getting worse, I gave 
belladonna in from 31 to 3 ij doses, three or four times a-day 
in a mucilaginous decoction, but without benefit : the animals died. 
A cow that had just been seized I bled to some purpose, and 
then ordered cold water to be poured over the head ; but this was 
also fruitless. 
On the 12th of July, a bull and a cow were seized with this 
complaint. On the 15th a cow, on the 16th one of the young 
animals, on the 19th a bull, on the 21st a cow; and here the 
disease began to vanish as suddenly as it had appeared. As I 
looked over the herd on the 27th of July, I found the animals 
quietly grazing, the eyes no longer rolled so wildly, but looked 
calm and natural ; the pulse and the heart no longer beat so 
rapidly, but had subsided to a healthy state. They now refused the 
mucilaginous drinks, which they had before swallowed with 
avidity. 
If this disease which I have been describing arose from inflam- 
mation of the brain, there is evidently a form under which that 
can appear so closely resembling rabies as not to be distinguishable 
from it. If it was produced by the bite of a dog, then the only 
point remarkable in it is, that such a number of animals should 
have been bitten. But if rabies was here produced without any 
inoculation, then is the possibility of such a fact most interesting, 
not only to men of science as a pathological fact, but to govern- 
ment, as bearing upon health and life. I am convinced that in this 
