202 RABIES IN THE DOMESTICATED ANIMALS. 
may be developed spontaneously in all animals—others have 
maintained that no dog can become rabid unless he has been 
inoculated with the rabid virus. Both these assertions are 
erroneous. The dog and the cat are the only ones of our do¬ 
mesticated animals that are subject to spontaneous rabies; and the 
actual cause of this disease is often unknown. The wolf and the 
fox are in the same situation. Herbivorous animals can neither 
propagate the disease among their own kind, nor communicate it 
to others. Huzard has incontestibly proved this in a memoir 
read at the Institute. Dupuy endeavoured to inoculate cows 
and sheep with the disease, by rubbing the wounds which he 
had aiade with a sponge that rabid animals of the same species 
had just bitten. The disease was not communicated, but, on the 
contrary, it did appear after the sponge had been bitten by a 
rabid dog, and then applied to the wound. M. Dupuy has also 
seen rabid sheep bite others of the same flock without the dis¬ 
ease ensuing : I have seen the same. 
It is commonly supposed that rabies appears at the expiration 
of forty days from the time of the bite: according to my expe¬ 
rience, the time is very uncertain. While I was with my father, 
an ass was bitten by a rabid dog. Seventy-two days elapsed before 
the appearance of the disease, and then in one night the animal 
gnawed its thighs almost to pieces. A draught-mare was bitten 
in the lip by a bitch : it became mad eighty-two days after the 
bite. Ill the animals to which I was now called, nothing was 
so variable as the period of the development of the malady. 
In some it appeared as early as twenty days—in one, forty-five 
days elapsed. Without laying much stress on the assertion of 
Gervy, that he has seen madness break out in a sow two years 
after she was bitten, or that of Schmid, who says that the wife 
of a tailor became rabid twenty years after she was inoculated it 
may surely be asserted, that after forty days have passed there is 
no security that the malady may not appear. 
A little before the appearance of the disease the bitten part 
becomes painful; it is tinged with red, and in some cases the 
wound re-opens. 
One of the horses that had been bitten, and in whom the 
symptoms of rabies were easily recognized, was led out of the 
stable. The pulse was accelerated to 118 beats in a minute—■ 
the wounds were intensely red — and the animal was in a high 
state of excitement and fury. He was immediately bled. This 
had no effect in calming him, but it gave us opportunity to ex¬ 
amine the physical state of his blood. Ten minutes after the 
bleedino' the vessel in which the blood had been received con- 
O' ^ , 
taincd nothing but a white serous fluid, and an albuminous sub- 
