486 MR. YOUATTS VETERINARY LECTURES. 
many. I saw also an illustration of the chief method of cure 
among some of the shepherds. It was to break one morbid de¬ 
rangement of the nervous system by setting up another. The 
dog was set upon the poor animals, and who were thus speedily 
frightened, not out of their senses, but into them again. I saw 
this succeed in several instances ; but I thought that it was a 
brutal and a dangerous mode of cure. The chain of diseased 
action might sometimes be broken, but there was hazard of the 
determination of blood to the sensorium, which was the cause 
of these convulsions, being abundantly and fatally increased. I 
thought it would have been better to have soothed the poor 
animal, and to have taken it home and nursed it, and, most of 
all, not to have exposed it to the influence of this cause of de¬ 
rangement of the vital and nervous currents. • 
Frequency of it in some Districts .—On some parts of the 
continent this disease is very prevalent and fatal among sheep, 
and is traced to the nature of the pasturage. Tessier, in his va¬ 
luable work on sheep, speaks of it as having been lately intro¬ 
duced, and becoming exceedingly prevalent and fatal in the 
district of Beauce, in France. When it once attacks a flock, it 
finds such a free disposition in them all to be affected by it that 
the farmer either gets rid of the whole, or destroys every sheep 
that exhibits the slightest symptoms of it; and many of the 
farmers of the district have actually given up sheep husbandry 
on account of the frequent prevalence and the ravages of this ma¬ 
lady. He attributes the complaint to the cultivation of a different 
kind of pasturage in Beauce than that on which the sheep used 
to feed; but he does not enter into the particulars which we 
could wish on such a point. 
Gaspain, speaking of its prevalence in Germany, says, that it 
is most destructive in the spring and the summer, and occasion¬ 
ally so in winter; and he tells us that the shepherds there attri¬ 
bute it to the feeding on some species of dock, and garlick, and, 
in the winter, on the sproutings of the pine. 
There can be lio doubt that pasturage and condition are main 
agents in the production of this disease. 
GOATS. 
Even among the few goats which are kept in Great Britain in 
a domesticated state, epilepsy is not an uncommon disease. In 
other countries, and even in some parts of France and Switzer¬ 
land, where they are kept for their milk, this disease is exceed¬ 
ingly troublesome among them. The goat is a more lively and 
seemingly imaginative animal than the sheep, and therefore more 
