ON RABIES CANINA. 
701 
thing held before his eyes, he exerts the power of this retracting 
muscle, which is attached round the posterior part of the eye, by 
which it is drawn a considerable distance within its orbit ; and 
the same power propels a strong cartilaginous substance called 
the haw, which instantly covers the anterior surface of the eye, 
by which means the whole ball is secured*. 
THE VETERINARIAN, DECEMBER 1, 1843. 
Ne quid falsi dicere audeat, ne quid veri non audeat. — Cicero. 
I beg to offer Mr. Turner many thanks for his kind and 
valuable letter, contained in the present number. I claim not 
a tithe part of the merit which he would attribute to me ; but, 
labouring with him and many other noble spirits, we have, I 
trust, effected a thorough revolution in the treatment of Rabies 
Canina. 
We grapple with it in its earliest stage by the occasional but 
rare use of the knife, and the constant but not cruel application 
of the lunar caustic. We laugh to scorn, in the present day, 
the various medicaments with which the patient used to be 
loaded ; and we have also discarded — I wish that I could say 
thoroughly — the deliquescent caustics with which he used to 
be tortured, but which did not — could not — always extirpate 
the poison. We have, in the terse language of Mr. Turner, 
“ crushed the serpent while in his germ, in almost innumerable 
instances among the lower animals, and happily in many a 
human being.’’ 
Mr. Turner is anxious to proceed farther; and so am I. I will 
relate two modes of proceeding which I have lately adopted. 
When a dog has been bitten under circumstances of suspicion 
I have had every part of him shorn ; and the consequence has 
* The comparative variations between the human and horse’s eyes are as 
follow : — 
1st. The horse’s eye has one muscle more than the human subject; viz. 
the retractor oculi. 
2d. The haw, or membrana nictitans of anatomists, improperly so called 
in the horse, as it is rather cartilaginous than membranous. 
VOL. XVI. 5 B 
