530 ON SPECIFIC FEVER OF HORSES, OXEN, &c. 
and I never knew a colt pass over the first hot or rainy season 
without them. 
Colts are purchased at all seasons of the year. The variation 
of temperature in the cold season—the heat of the day, sixty 
or seventy degrees, and of the night, thirty-two degrees, and in 
the hot season the thermometer being from eighty to ninety 
degrees in the shade, and from one hundred and twenty to one 
hundred and forty degrees in the sun—these things only varied 
the local affection, as they induced in particular organs that de¬ 
bility which predisposed to disease. Congregation then became 
the exciting cause. 
In India, during the rainy season, there is not, sometimes, a 
current of air sufficient to convey off the deteriorated atmosphere 
which is produced by congregation in the open air, and fever is 
excited in so short a period that even the daily journies of several 
miles are not sufficient to prevent it,—although change of place 
is the only effectual method of accomplishing it. 
Cavalry horses in India are not constantly stabled, and, in 
some parts, stables are unknown except as places that may have 
been spoken or heard of in some distant part of the country. 
Stable-fever, therefore, is not a term that we can use: besides, 
the fever is still the same, although the local affection is different 
in the open air and in dirty stables. Even in clean stables in 
India the fever cannot be prevented when the animal will be 
attacked by it even in the open air. 
Colts that have had this specific fever once are not liable to it 
a second time. Colts and horses are afterwards exposed to the 
exciting causes by being congregated in great numbers, without 
being affected by any local disease. It is, therefore, advan¬ 
tageous to do away with the predisposition by inoculating colts 
in the lower lip as early as convenient with the pus of strangles. 
Serious losses occur at a later period, when colts are about being 
brought into work, from their not having previously had this fever. 
I had twenty Arabians, of different ages, in training one sea¬ 
son, 1829-30, and I have seen more or less numbers in the sta¬ 
bles of others, as well as colts from thorough-bred English stock, 
bred by Messrs, Stevenson, Gwatkins, Majoribanks, Gage, and 
others. I never saw or heard of an Arab havino; what trainers 
call distemper, notwithstanding the changes to which these ani¬ 
mals are subjected, from the Persian Gulf to different parts of 
India. The colts from private breeders, however, were subject to 
it; and to those only who have been connected with the turf, and 
had colts engaged in produce stakes, can the disappointment 
be known; and which might have been avoided by earlier doing 
away with the predisposition, by inoculation with strangles. 
