ON RABIES CANINA. 
155 
circumstances which I have stated seem to prove', that it is a 
disease not so much of the organs of respiration as of those 
nerves which bind together numerous portions of the frame in 
the discharge of that function. 
Whafis the cause of this sad disease ?—The saliva of a rabid 
animal received into a wound, or on an abraded or mucous 
surface. 
Hydrophobia has been produced in the human subject by the 
power of imagination, or by strong excitement; but the disease 
has materially differed from rabies in its symptoms, progress, 
and termination. 
No one, I fancy, will deny, that in man, in the horse, in 
cattle, sheep, and swine, rabies is caused by inoculation alone ; 
but it is said to be spontaneous in the dog and his varieties. 
If, however, its spontaneous origin be denied in so many animals, 
where is the proof that it arises in any animal without the con¬ 
tact of the rabid virus ? Heat, thirst, and putrid meat, are 
supposed to be exciting causes. Scarcely a week passes during 
the summer season without some earnest exhortation from the 
sage editors of the daily press, to give our dogs plenty of water. 
I would ask for one authenticated instance in which rabies has 
been produced by the most highly putrid meat, by extremity of 
thirst, or even by the heat of a vertical sun. 
Rabies occurs almost as frequently in the spring, the autumn, 
and the winter, as it does in summer. 
At the Veterinary School at Alfort, three dogs were selected 
as the subjects of some very cruel but decisive experiments. It 
was during the heat of summer, and they were all chained in 
the full blaze of the sun. To one, salted iheat alone was given; 
to the second, water only; and to the third, neither food nor 
drink. They all died; but not one of them exhibited the 
slightest symptom of rabies. 
Am I asked,— If the disease be now propagated from dog to 
dog by inoculation alone, whence did it at first arise ? I should 
not entertain a very high opinion of the querist; nor should I 
be in haste to answer him, until he had told me whence arose 
rubeola, variola, or syphilis. They sprung from some unknown 
morbid action, and, having once spontaneously arisen, each is 
^ now propagated in its own way. 
But are there not some diseases communicable by contact^ 
and yet generated also ? Most certainly there are. Glanders 
in the horse and distemper in the dog are both generated and 
communicated. 
One thing however is certain, that every disease is governed 
by its own laws. The cow-pox, glanders, and syphilis are com- 
