VETERINARY SCHOOL AT ALFORT. 
557 
conveyance throughout the year of upwards of seventy- three mil- 
lions of persons, and a corresponding quantity of merchandize, 
the daily surveillance of the streets, markets, public places, and 
all the horse establishments of the town, is committed to — would 
any one believe it?— a single individual, ill paid, and a complete 
stranger to veterinary affairs, which, in point of fact, is equivalent 
to saying that in Paris there is no such thing as horse supervision. 
Well, such a state of things must be altered ; we must have 
real and rigorous and constant inspections of establishments where 
great numbers of horses are employed ; and every person possess- 
ing a glandered horse must be obliged, under the declaration of 
penalties fixed by the laws in force, to pay immediate attention to 
enactments so desirable, in order that, in whatever situation it 
may be, and under any pretext, the use of the glandered horse may 
be given up; and that his slaughter be rendered peremptory, 
seeing that competent judges has pronounced his case incurable. 
And, lastly, that no communication be permitted on the part of 
man with the suspected animal further than is absolutely neces- 
sary to give it food and water, and the requisite cleaning ; so that 
hopes might, at least, be cherished of putting human creatures out 
of the reach of the stroke of so dreaded a malady. 
By the side of this scourge of the equine race comes as an 
equivalent, reckoning the disasters it is the cause of, a disease to 
which oxen are subject, the ‘consequence, like the former, of want 
of knowledge of their hygiene and of the abuses of them. We are 
going to speak of the peripneumony (pleuro-pneumonia) of oxen, 
which in our days has spread so widely, seeing there is hardly 
any country in Europe which has not felt its ravages. 
Confined at one time, according to some authors, to mountainous 
countries, where it must, say they, have been engendered in the 
narrow low sheds in which they herd the flocks for the winter, 
peripneumony has spread from this primitive fomes in every 
direction, so that at the present day it is common to the mountain 
and the plain. 
The first causes of this novel destroyer to our agriculture are as 
yet obscure, equally so with all those of general epizootic diseases. 
In the artificial state in which we compel our animals to live 
amidst so many influences hostile to their nature and their organi- 
zation, the development of disease is a complex result, and the 
mind becomes lost in search after the special causes which have 
co-operated in their production. 
The air, by its sudden variations of temperature, water by its 
coldness and impurity, stables and cowhouses by their lack of air 
VOL. XX. 4 E 
