412 
ON TUBERCULAR PHTHISIS. 
old, both of the horse and the ox. M. Dupuy has found them in 
the fcetal lamb of two or three months. 
Jnthe first rank of indirect causes he places domesticity, or 
the abuse of the animal by man. Next is the influence of cli- 
mate. He refers to animals brought from warm countries into 
those that are cold and humid ; and he says that they all become 
phthisical. “ It is thus,” adds he, “ that in our cold climate 
we see the apes, and the lions, and the tigers, and the drome- 
daries, and the birds, perish from this disease in our menageries.” 
Agriculture and the cavalry have often to deplore the enor- 
mous losses which they sustain from ill-ventilated and unhealthy 
habitations. Very few of the cavalry barracks are constructed 
with any view to the health of the horses, or scarcely with the 
possibility of preserving it. He illustrates this by certain com- 
parisons between the surface of the lungs of the horse and the 
little air wffiich is allowed him in some of these wretched build- 
ings. Among the herbivora bad food is a fruitful source of 
phthisis : their rations, also, are composed of decayed vegeta- 
bles, badly collected, and badly preserved. The hay or the corn 
is mouldy, rusty, and covered with parasitical growths. 
The manner in which the horse is taken care of is a subject of 
much importance, and but too little regarded in the cavalry ser- 
vice. A horse will often be in the highest condition when en- 
trusted to one soldier, and will waste away and die under the 
care of another. 
The progress of tuberculous disease is, as in man, very uncer- 
tain. M. Dupuy speaks of a horse that had been employed 
at Alfort during thirteen years, and that when it died contained 
tubercles in the lungs, and numerous cicatrices of ulceration in 
the mucous membrane of the nose. He was on the point of 
being slaughtered, when Chabert, admiring his beautiful propor- 
tions, directed him to be kept, as a kind of model of the proper 
structure of the horse. M. Richard relates an analogous fact that 
occurred in his regiment. Several patients have been known to 
live seven or eight years after they were evidently affected with 
tubercular disease. 
It is difficult or impossible to recognize this disease in an in- 
cipient state ; and there have been many horses that have died 
of acute disease, as inflammation of the lungs, in which nume- 
rous tubercles, the existence of which had not been dreamed of, 
w r ere found in the pulmonary tissue. 
The author next details many experiments that were made in 
1824, in order to ascertain the possibility of detecting the exist- 
ence of tubercles in the lungs of the horse by means of percus- 
