246 
CHANGE OF STRUCTURE IN THE HEART. 
As I am writing, I cannot help remarking with regret that 
with all your endeavours to make your journal acceptable to 
the profession, there are some legitimate veterinary articles 
which first find their way into other publications. These 
things ought not to be. 
PARTIAL CHANGE OF STRUCTURE IN THE 
HEART OF A HORSE. SUDDEN DEATH. 
By C. N. Page, M.R.C.V.S., Banbury. 
The subject of this disease was a bay carriage-horse, 
fifteen years old, the property of Colonel North, M.P. For 
the last six years, which is the entire time he had been 
in the colonel’s possession, he had been doing farm work. 
During this period no indication of his being the subject 
of any disease had ever been observed, but while he was 
assisting, at the beginning of March last, in drawing some 
timber, he fell down and expired immediately. 
It was late at night before I saw" him opened, and the 
man who skinned him had removed the head prior to my 
arrival, so that no opportunity was afforded me of examin- 
ing the brain. With the exception of the heart, all the 
other organs, both of the thorax and abdomen, w"ere found 
to be perfectly free from structural change. 
I send the heart for your examination. 
[The heart was a full-sized one, and w eighed eleven pounds. 
It presented no abnormal condition wRich would account for 
the sudden dea h of the animal, the vessels, valves, &c., 
being quite free from disease. At its apex a grayish coloured 
mass, irregular in outline, uneven on its surface, and weigh- 
ing about a quarter of a pound, had usurped the place of the 
true muscular substance of the organ. On making a sec- 
tion of this, a cream -like fluid oozed out from between the 
gray-coloured striae w r hich made up the chief bulk of the 
mass, and which was so dense as to impart a sensation of 
cutting through fibrinous material. Under the microscope, 
the cream-like fluid presented an appearance analogous to 
degenerated tissue, mixed w ith a few" cells scarcely so large 
as blood-discs. No caudate or so-called cancer-cells were 
to be detected. Besides this abnormal deposition, the carnae 
columnae of the left ventricle show T ed, in two separate places, 
a change in colour and other indications of a similar disease 
having commenced.] 
