ON THE CONTAGIOUSNESS OF STRANGLES. 
49 
apt to turn into vice. Growth being now complete, the orgasm 
having acquired all its attributes, progressive advance in assimila- 
tion stops, is completed, and the action of de-assimilation is about 
commencing. 
Deprive an animal at this crisis of his life of his sexual organs, 
and the muscles of the fore-quarters diminish, his neck grows thin, 
the head alone, from its bony construction, remaining large and 
strongly marked. While behind, the straight and pointed quarter, 
and flat and lank thighs, become incapable of their proper develop- 
ment. Every part of the economy betrays defective proportions 
and an absence of that harmonious conformation necessary to con- 
stitute a well-made horse. Moreover, the animal suddenly dege- 
nerates from his factitious energy and proud elation, for which he 
is solely dependent upon his generative organs, into a state of soft- 
ness and atony, the inevitable result of the dispossession of organs 
which up to that period had re-acted upon his entire constitution. 
All that he retains is his intractable disposition, which may ren- 
der him dangerous, or at least difficult of management. Rarely 
have good services been exacted from a horse from whom the tes- 
ticles have been taken after such development, at a period when 
almost all his vital energy is concentrated upon parts endowed with 
the important office of the reproduction of his species. 
Repertoire de Medecine Veter inair e, Bruxelles , April , 1849. 
[To be continued]. 
On the Contagiousness of Strangles. 
(A Collection of Observations tending to demonstrate the truth of this.) 
The idea of strangles being contagious is not new. Solleysel 
entertained it ; indeed, he thought that glanders might be caught 
from strangles. He viewed strangles as an effort of nature to dis- 
charge out of the system some general disease of it; and thought 
that horses, like children having small-pox, must have it once in 
their lives. The tumour between the branches of the jaw-bone 
did not invariably, he observed, come to suppuration, but he always 
thought the end better answered when it did. Some horses, 
however, he added, cast off this peccant humour through other 
parts of the body, such as the shoulder, the hock, over the 
kidneys, through the foot ; through, indeed, that part of the body 
which was the weakest. A horse will cast off his humour through 
a wounded part, whenever Nature is prepared to get rid of it. 
VOL. XXIII. H 
