HYDROCEPHALUS IN A COLT. 163 
11/A.—There still remains torpor of the bowels. Give eight 
ounces of Epsom salts in solution. 
12/A.—The bowels at last are responding to the action of the 
medicine—patient more under the influence of vertigo. 
13//i.—Died. And, vexing to relate, contrary to my wish, ex¬ 
pressed all along, no information reached me of it until too late to 
unravel what still remained, by an examination after death, of its 
cause; but it was nine miles from home, and, therefore, rather ex¬ 
cusable in the owner. 
There is a very palpable error in the last case now on record— 
in which the word bowels is substituted for rowels, making the 
language ridiculous, but which I trust will, by every discerning 
eye, be seen to be only verbal. 
MELANOSIS. 
By Mr. W. C. Spooner, V.S., Southampton. 
In The Veterinarian for January last, there appears a paper 
of mine, relating a somewhat remarkable case of melanosis in an 
Arabian horse, together with a drawing describing the appearance 
of the parts after the animal was destroyed. I regret that the 
paper was so short, but I endeavoured to procure some account of 
the disease in the human subject, though I did not succeed in my 
wishes. I am not aware that any English veterinary writer men¬ 
tions the disease; nor is there any case of the kind related in 
The Veterinarian prior to mine. A few days since I met 
with the Medical Gazette for January 24th last, which contains a 
lecture, a great part of which is devoted to the subject of melanosis. 
The lecture is by B. Phillips, Esq., F.R.S., and was delivered at 
the Westminster Hospital School. If I had met with it before, it 
would have enabled me to have made my paper more useful and 
interesting. 
The lecturer defines it, after Laennec, “ as a pathological produc¬ 
tion deposited upon the surface or in the substance of our organs, 
of a darkish or blackish colour, having no analogy with the healthy 
tissues of the body.” “ The disease, which was described by Brug- 
noni, in 1781, which was hereditarily transmitted among the white 
horses of Chevasso, and which he termed hemorrhoids, was evi¬ 
dently melanosis ; it was usually developed around the root of the 
tail and the anus. 
Some years later, in 1781, the same disease was observed at 
Bresse. Gollety-Latournelle transmitted an account of it in 1809: 
he says “ there supervened in a young stallion, on the second year 
